very air through which she moved there was but little warmth; and the sky, the sky of a land without horizons, swept and washed clean by the April showers, extended a cold cruel blue, without elevation, narrowed suddenly by the ugly, dark wall of the Jura where, here and there, lingered yet a few miserable trails and patches of snow.  All the glory of the season must have been within herself—­and I was glad this feeling had come into her life, if only for a little time.

“I am pleased to hear you say these words.”  She gave me a quick look.  Quick, not stealthy.  If there was one thing of which she was absolutely incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very rhythm of her walk.  It was I who was looking at her covertly—­if I may say so.  I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had seen and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies.  I use the word aristocratic, for want of a better term.  The Chateau Borel, embowered in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame de Stael, in the Napoleonic era.  Only the Napoleonic despotism, the booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest.  And Madame de S—­ was very far from resembling the gifted author of Corinne.  She made a great noise about being persecuted.  I don’t know if she were regarded in certain circles as dangerous.  As to being watched, I imagine that the Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a most distant observation.  It was in its exclusiveness an ideal abode for hatching superior plots—­whether serious or futile.  But all this did not interest me.  I wanted to know the effect its extraordinary inhabitants and its special atmosphere had produced on a girl like Miss Haldin, so true, so honest, but so dangerously inexperienced!  Her unconsciously lofty ignorance of the baser instincts of mankind left her disarmed before her own impulses.  And there was also that friend of her brother, the significant new arrival from Russia....  I wondered whether she had managed to meet him.

We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.

“You know,” I attacked her suddenly, “if you don’t intend telling me anything, you must say so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be final.  But I won’t play at delicacy.  I ask you point-blank for all the details.”

She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.

“You are as curious as a child.”

“No.  I am only an anxious old man,” I replied earnestly.

She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain the degree of my anxiety or the number of my years.  My physiognomy has never been expressive, I believe, and as to my years I am not ancient enough as yet to be strikingly decrepit.  I have no long beard like the good hermit of a romantic ballad; my footsteps are not tottering, my aspect not that of a slow, venerable sage.  Those picturesque advantages are not mine.  I am old, alas, in a brisk, commonplace way.  And it seemed to me as though there were some pity for me in Miss Haldin’s prolonged glance.  She stepped out a little quicker.