“There is one thing you do not know,” he said.  “More than once—­on my honor—­at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline, or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear, something that resembled you.  Those fur toques with little feathers that everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head.  Whenever I see one, I follow it.  On my word, though, not for her.  The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered.  It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne, who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced.  Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold.  Tell me, Marianne, was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?”

Marianne laughed.

“Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy,” said she, looking at Lissac.

“Melancholy, nothing more.”

“Let us say elegiac.  Those little fits have come upon you rather late in the day, have they not?  A little valerian and quinine, made up into silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy.”

“You are making fun of me.”

“No,” she said.  “But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot along for such a distance behind plumed toques—­it was so easy not to take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a creditor.”

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

“Ah! it is because—­I loved you too dearly!”

“I know that!” exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her elegance, of an artist’s model giving a pupil a retort.  “A madrigal that has not answered, no; does it rain?”

“I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?” said Lissac.

“Do not doubt it, my dear friend.  It is always stupid to deprive one’s self of the woman who adores one.  Such rarities are not common.”

“You remember, dear Marianne,” said Guy, “the day when you boldly wrote upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly:  ’To him I love more than every one else in the world?’”

“Yes,” said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward.  “Such things as that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity.”

“And you were sincere?”

“On the faith of an honest man,” she answered laughingly.

“And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another before that one.”