’But, Marie, why should you not love me?  I am sure you would love me.’

’Listen to me, M. Urmand; listen to me, and be generous to me.  I think you can be generous to a poor girl who is very unhappy.  I do not love you.  I do not say that I should not have loved you, if you had been the first.  Why should not any girl love you?  You are above me in every way, and rich, and well spoken of; and your life has been less rough and poor than mine.  It is not that I have been proud.  What is there that I can be proud of—­except my uncle’s trust in me?  But George Voss had come to me before, and had made me promise that I would love him;—­and I do love him.  How can I help it, if I wished to help it?  O, M. Urmand, can you not be generous?  Think how little it is that you will lose.’  But Adrian Urmand did not like to be told of the girl’s love for another man.  His generosity would almost have been more easily reached had she told him of George’s love for her.  People had assured him since he was engaged that Marie Bromar was the handsomest girl in Lorraine or Alsace; and he felt it to be an injury that this handsome girl should prefer such a one as George Voss to himself.  Marie, with a woman’s sharpness, perceived all this accurately.  ‘Remember,’ said she, ’that I had hardly seen you when George and I were—­when he and I became such friends.’

‘Your uncle doesn’t want you to marry his son.’

‘I shall never become George’s wife without consent; never.’

‘Then what would be the use of my giving way?’ asked Urmand.  ’He would never consent.’

She paused for a moment before she replied.

‘To save yourself,’ said she, ’from living with a woman who cannot love you, and to save me from living with a man I cannot love.’

‘And is this to be all the answer you will give me?’

‘It is the request that I have to make to you,’ said Marie.

‘Then I had better go down to your uncle.’  And he went down to Michel Voss, leaving Marie Bromar again alone.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The people of Colmar think Colmar to be a considerable place, and far be it from us to hint that it is not so.  It is—­or was in the days when Alsace was French—­the chief town of the department of the Haut Rhine.  It bristles with barracks, and is busy with cotton factories.  It has been accustomed to the presence of a prefet, and is no doubt important.  But it is not so large that people going in and out of it can pass without attention, and this we take to be the really true line of demarcation between a big town and a little one.  Had Michel Voss and Adrian Urmand passed through Lyons or Strasbourg on their journey to Granpere, no one would have noticed them, and their acquaintances in either of those cities would not have been a bit the wiser.  But it was not probable that they should leave the train at the Colmar station, and