spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine, or over the table of a cafe, talking till the small hours—­Elysian sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more bocks than I should care to count.  On Sundays and holidays we would take long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with wildflowers, and romp like children.  He was tall and slender, with dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly.  I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students and etudiantes sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the trottoir; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the multitude on the terrace of a cafe; and Edmund and Godelinette coming to join me—­he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets:  I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age.  Then we would drink our aperitifs, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue’s.

Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by way of civilising her.  She had learned English, and prattled it with an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise perhaps somewhat commonplace observations.  She was fond of reading; she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally a very good-natured and quite presentable little person.  She was Parisian and adaptable.  To meet her, you would never have suspected her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her.  One January night, four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac.  He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger.  Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand, and sent for a doctor.  In his manuscript-littered study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure.  When she got well there was no talk of her leaving.  Pair couldn’t let her go back to her tailor; he couldn’t turn her into the streets.  Besides, during the months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain and protect