“I want you to tell me all about Versailles,” she said, looking to the left and the gray wing beyond the chapel.  “Its histories and its meanings.  I used to read about it all after Sarah brought me here once for our treat, but you probably are learned upon the subject, and I want to know.”

“I would much rather hear what you did when Sarah brought you here for your treat,” he said.

“Oh! it was a very simple day,” and she leaned back and laughed softly at the recollection.  “Papa was very hard up at that time, you know, and we were rather poor, so we came as cheaply as we could, Sarah, Clementine, and I, and I remember there were some very snuffy men in the train—­we could not go first-class, you see—­and one of them rather frightened me.”

“The brute!” said Hector.

“I think I was about fourteen.”

“And even then perfectly beautiful, I expect,” he commented to himself.

“We walked up from the station, and oh! we saw all the galleries and we ran all over the park, but we missed the way to Trianon somehow and never saw that, and when we got back here we were too tired to start again.  We had only had sandwiches, you see, that we brought with us, and some funny little drinks at a cafe down there,” and she pointed vaguely towards the lake, “because we found we had only one franc fifty between us all.  But we were so happy, and Clementine knows a great deal, and told us many things which were quite different from what was in the guide-books—­but it seems so long, long ago.  Do you know it must be six years.”  And she looked at him seriously.

“Half a lifetime!” agreed Hector, with a whimsical smile.

“Oh! you are laughing at me!” she said, and there was a cloud in the blue stars which looked up at him.

He made a movement nearer her—­while his deep voice took every tone of tenderness.

“Indeed, indeed I am not—­you dear little girl!  I love to hear of your day.  I was only smiling to think that six years ago you were a baby child, and I was then an old man in feeling—­let me see, I was twenty-five, and I was in Russia.”

He stopped suddenly; there were some circumstances which, sitting there beside her, he would rather not remember connected with Russia.

This was one of the peculiarities of Theodora.  There was something about her which seemed to wither up all low or vicious things.  It was not that she filled people with ascetic thoughts of saints and angels and their mother in heaven, only she seemed suddenly to enhance simple joys with beauty and charm.

They talked on for half an hour, and with every moment he discovered fresh qualities of sweetness and light in her gentle heart.

She was not ill educated either, but she had never speculated upon things, she took them for granted just as they were, and Jean d’Agreve was probably the only awakening book she had ever read.