“That’s nothing against me,” said Newman with an immense smile; “your taste was not formed.”

His smile made Madame de Cintre smile.  “Have you formed it?” she asked.  And then she said, in a different tone, “Where do you wish to live?”

“Anywhere in the wide world you like.  We can easily settle that.”

“I don’t know why I ask you,” she presently continued.  “I care very little.  I think if I were to marry you I could live almost anywhere.  You have some false ideas about me; you think that I need a great many things—­that I must have a brilliant, worldly life.  I am sure you are prepared to take a great deal of trouble to give me such things.  But that is very arbitrary; I have done nothing to prove that.”  She paused again, looking at him, and her mingled sound and silence were so sweet to him that he had no wish to hurry her, any more than he would have had a wish to hurry a golden sunrise.  “Your being so different, which at first seemed a difficulty, a trouble, began one day to seem to me a pleasure, a great pleasure.  I was glad you were different.  And yet if I had said so, no one would have understood me; I don’t mean simply to my family.”

“They would have said I was a queer monster, eh?” said Newman.

“They would have said I could never be happy with you—­you were too different; and I would have said it was just because you were so different that I might be happy.  But they would have given better reasons than I. My only reason”—­and she paused again.

But this time, in the midst of his golden sunrise, Newman felt the impulse to grasp at a rosy cloud.  “Your only reason is that you love me!” he murmured with an eloquent gesture, and for want of a better reason Madame de Cintre reconciled herself to this one.

Newman came back the next day, and in the vestibule, as he entered the house, he encountered his friend Mrs. Bread.  She was wandering about in honorable idleness, and when his eyes fell upon her she delivered him one of her curtsies.  Then turning to the servant who had admitted him, she said, with the combined majesty of her native superiority and of a rugged English accent, “You may retire; I will have the honor of conducting monsieur.  In spite of this combination, however, it appeared to Newman that her voice had a slight quaver, as if the tone of command were not habitual to it.  The man gave her an impertinent stare, but he walked slowly away, and she led Newman up-stairs.  At half its course the staircase gave a bend, forming a little platform.  In the angle of the wall stood an indifferent statue of an eighteenth-century nymph, simpering, sallow, and cracked.  Here Mrs. Bread stopped and looked with shy kindness at her companion.

“I know the good news, sir,” she murmured.

“You have a good right to be first to know it,” said Newman.  “You have taken such a friendly interest.”

Mrs. Bread turned away and began to blow the dust off the statue, as if this might be mockery.