with sweetness the rifling bee; he diffused it about him as sweet plants shed their perfume. Does the nectarine love either the bee or bird it feeds? Is the sweet-briar enamoured of the air?

“Good-night, Dr. John. You are good, you are beautiful, but you are not mine. Good-night, and God bless you!”

Thus I closed my musings. “Good-night” left my lips in sound. I heard the words spoken, and then I heard an echo, quite close.

“Good-night, mademoiselle; or rather, good-evening. The sun is scarce set. I hope you slept well?”

I started, but was only discomposed a moment. I knew the voice and speaker.

“Slept, monsieur! When? Where?”

“You may well inquire when, where. It seems you turn day into night, and choose a desk for a pillow. Rather hard lodging?”

“It was softened for me, monsieur, while I slept. That unseen, gift-bringing thing which haunts my desk remembered me. No matter how I fell asleep, I awoke pillowed and covered.”

“Did the shawls keep you warm?”

“Very warm. Do you ask thanks for them?”

“No. You looked pale in your slumbers. Are you home-sick?”

“To be home-sick one must have a home, which I have not.”

“Then you have more need of a careful friend. I scarcely know any one, Miss Lucy, who needs a friend more absolutely than you. Your very faults imperatively require it. You want so much checking, regulating, and keeping down.”

This idea of “keeping down” never left M. Paul’s head; the most habitual subjugation would, in my case, have failed to relieve him of it. No matter. What did it signify? I listened to him, and did not trouble myself to be too submissive. His occupation would have been gone had I left him nothing to “keep down.”

“You need watching, and watching over,” he pursued, “and it is well for you that I see this, and do my best to discharge both duties. I watch you and others pretty closely, pretty constantly, nearer and oftener than you or they think. Do you see that window with a light in it?”

He pointed to a lattice in one of the college boarding-houses.

“That,” said he, “is a room I have hired, nominally for a study, virtually for a post of observation. There I sit and read for hours together. It is my way, my taste. My book is this garden; its contents are human nature—female human nature. I know you all by heart. Ah! I know you well—St. Pierre, the Parisienne; cette maîtresse-femme, my cousin Beck herself.”

“It is not right, monsieur.”

“Comment? It is not right? By whose creed? Does some dogma of Calvin or Luther condemn it? What is that to me? I am no Protestant. My rich father (for, though I have known poverty, and once starved for a year in a garret in Rome—starved wretchedly, often on a meal a day, and sometimes not that—yet I was born to wealth)—my rich father was a good Catholic, and he gave me a priest and a Jesuit for a tutor. I retain his lessons; and to what discoveries, grand Dieu! have they not aided me?”