“Alas!” said Monsieur Fanjat, “do not deceive yourself, monsieur; there is no meaning in her sigh.”

Those who have ever watched for hours with delight the sleep of one who is tenderly beloved, whose eyes will smile to them at waking, can understand the sweet yet terrible emotion that shook the colonel’s soul.  To him, this sleep was an illusion; the waking might be death, death in its most awful form.  Suddenly, a little goat jumped in three bounds to the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at the sound.  She sprang to her feet, but so lightly that the movement did not frighten the freakish animal; then she caught sight of Philippe, and darted away, followed by her four-footed friend, to a hedge of elders; there she uttered the same little cry like a frightened bird, which the two men had heard near the other gate.  Then she climbed an acacia, and nestling into its tufted top, she watched the stranger with the inquisitive attention of the forest birds.

“Adieu, adieu, adieu,” she said, without the soul communicating one single intelligent inflexion to the word.

It was uttered impassively, as the bird sings his note.

“She does not recognize me!” cried the colonel, in despair.  “Stephanie! it is Philippe, thy Philippe, Philippe!”

And the poor soldier went to the acacia; but when he was a few steps from it, the countess looked at him, as if defying him, although a slight expression of fear seemed to flicker in her eye; then, with a single bound she sprang from the acacia to a laburnum, and thence to a Norway fir, where she darted from branch to branch with extraordinary agility.

“Do not pursue her,” said Monsieur Fanjat to the colonel, “or you will arouse an aversion which might become insurmountable.  I will help you to tame her and make her come to you.  Let us sit on this bench.  If you pay no attention to her, she will come of her own accord to examine you.”

“She! not to know me! to flee me!” repeated the colonel, seating himself on a bench with his back to a tree that shaded it, and letting his head fall upon his breast.

The doctor said nothing.  Presently, the countess came gently down the fir-tree, letting herself swing easily on the branches, as the wind swayed them.  At each branch she stopped to examine the stranger; but seeing him motionless, she at last sprang to the ground and came slowly towards him across the grass.  When she reached a tree about ten feet distant, against which she leaned, Monsieur Fanjat said to the colonel in a low voice,—­

“Take out, adroitly, from my right hand pocket some lumps of sugar you will feel there.  Show them to her, and she will come to us.  I will renounce in your favor my sole means of giving her pleasure.  With sugar, which she passionately loves, you will accustom her to approach you, and to know you again.”

“When she was a woman,” said Philippe, sadly, “she had no taste for sweet things.”