Monsieur de Clagny was her valiant champion; he went several times to the Chateau d’Anzy to acquire the right to contradict the rumors current as to the woman he still faithfully adored, even in her fall; and he maintained that she and Lousteau were engaged together on some great work.  But the lawyer was laughed to scorn.

The month of October was lovely; autumn is the finest season in the valley of the Loire; but in 1836 it was unusually glorious.  Nature seemed to aid and abet Dinah, who, as Bianchon had predicted, gradually developed a heart-felt passion.  In one month she was an altered woman.  She was surprised to find in herself so many inert and dormant qualities, hitherto in abeyance.  To her Lousteau seemed an angel; for heart-love, the crowning need of a great nature, had made a new woman of her.  Dinah was alive!  She had found an outlet for her powers, she saw undreamed-of vistas in the future—­in short, she was happy, happy without alarms or hindrances.  The vast castle, the gardens, the park, the forest, favored love.

Lousteau found in Madame de la Baudraye an artlessness, nay, if you will, an innocence of mind which made her very original; there was much more of the unexpected and winning in her than in a girl.  Lousteau was quite alive to a form of flattery which in most women is assumed, but which in Dinah was genuine; she really learned from him the ways of love; he really was the first to reign in her heart.  And, indeed, he took the trouble to be exceedingly amiable.

Men, like women, have a stock in hand of recitatives, of cantabile, of nocturnes, airs and refrains—­shall we say of recipes, although we speak of love—­which each one believes to be exclusively his own.  Men who have reached Lousteau’s age try to distribute the “movements” of this repertoire through the whole opera of a passion.  Lousteau, regarding this adventure with Dinah as a mere temporary connection, was eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and during that beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing melodies and most elaborate barcarolles.  In fact, he exhausted every resource of the stage management of love, to use an expression borrowed from the theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of his manoeuvres.

“If that woman ever forgets me!” he would sometimes say to himself as they returned together from a long walk in the woods, “I will owe her no grudge—­she will have found something better.”

When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.

Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave Anzy in the early days of November.  His paper required his presence in Paris.  Before breakfast, on the day before he was to leave, the journalist and Dinah saw the master of the house come in with an artist from Nevers, who restored carvings of all kinds.