Till her dying day the little old maid will never forget the look that settled upon his face after the first paralyzed moment in which he realized the woman's meaning. It was such a look that she hastily averted her eyes and tremblingly followed the chambermaid up the wide stone stairs.
She never saw him afterward, for he left the island that same evening. But she heard of him only last summer. He has married a sprightly girl of eighteen, and has some renown in his own country--that of being the heaviest eater, sleeper, talker and _sitter_ of the Lotus Club.
As his friends always said, he has no sentiment, even in his pictures.
As for Miss Deane, she is no older now than then. The volatile drops in her blood effervesce as of old, and her flirtation is as desperate with that invisible adorer as if she were twenty instead of--more.
But it is true that sometimes, at long intervals, she takes a bit of yellow paper from a secret place, and her spectacles grow dim (she wears them only in private) as she reads, in a feminine hand that seems to skip and chipper all over the page, "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as--" Then she usually giggles, in queer, mirthless fashion, as she chirrups, "What a ridiculous little goosie I was!" before she folds the paper away for another long repose, readjusts her coquettish but scanty frizzes, and goes down stairs again to her invisible adorer and her perpetual flirtation.
And nobody hears the wail in her foolish old-young heart as she goes: "Ah, why might it not have been?"
For then she might have been less lively, and he less dead, both grown side by side into richer, fuller, sweeter ripeness for the great harvester whom we call Death.
The traveller who, leaving Paris by express at 10 A.M., reaches the Orleans dépôt at Limoges at six in the evening, will see spacious boulevards, imposing buildings and a general air of stateliness and pretension, recalling the metropolis he left behind him in the morning. His omnibus will whisk him through streets crowded with promenaders, a picturesque panorama of well-dressed people, with a generous sprinkling of the light-blue jackets of the chasseurs, the gleaming helmets of the dragoons, the red kepis of the infantry, the broad-brimmed hats and sable mantles of the priesthood and the red-and-orange head-kerchiefs of the working-women. If it be late in the season and the days are short, he will see at every turn cafés ablaze with light, and the wide sidewalks before them lined with tables at which, cool as it may be, crowds of loungers are seated sipping bier, absinthe or eau sucrée. But, looking up the dingy side-streets, here and there he may detect, by the lines of flickering, straggling gas-lights, glimpses of another Limoges--glimpses of steep streets ending in stairways; of narrow and darkened passages where the opposite buildings nod to each other from across the street until they all but touch; of courts where curious little enshrined images of the Madonna and the saints look down from niches in the corners, and where heads are peeping out from every window to catch a whiff of evening air; and of sombre alleys, each lighted by a single lamp suspended midway, under the uncertain rays of which swarms of children and dogs are vying to awaken the loudest echoes.