her with a singular facility, and with a kind of relief in them; but the later years gradually seemed to lose themselves in a mist, to become mixed one with another: and so Jeanne would remain now and then an indefinite time, her head bowed toward one of the calendars, her mind spellbound by the past, without being able to remember whether it was in this or that calendar that such or such a remembrance ought to be decided. She ranged them around the room like the religious pictures that point out the Way of the Cross in a church,- these tableaux of days that were no more. Then she would abruptly set down her chair before one of them; and there she would sit until night came, immobile, staring at it, buried in her vague researches. All at once, when the sap began to awaken in the boughs beneath the warmth of the sun; when the crops began to spring up in the fields, the trees to become verdant; when the appletrees in the orchard swelled out roundly like rosy balls, and perfumed the plain,-then a great counter-agitation came over her; she could not seem to stay still. She went and came; she left the house and returned to it twenty times a day, and even took now and then a stroll the length of the farming tracts, excited to a sort of fever of regret. The sight of a daisy blossoming in a tuft of grass, the flash of a ray of sun slipping down between the leaves, the glittering of a strip of water in which the blue sky was mirrored,—all moved her; awakened a tenderness in her; gave her sensations very far away, like an echo of her emotions as a young girl, when she went dreaming about the country-side. One morning the faithful Rosalie came later than usual into her room, and said, setting down upon the table the bowl of coffee: "Come now, drink this. Denis is down-stairs waiting for us at the door. We will go over to Peuples to-day: I've got some business to attend to over there." Jeanne thought that she was going to faint, so deep was her emotion at the sound of that name, at the thought of going to the home of her girlhood. She dressed herself, trembling with emotion, frightened and tremulous at the mere idea of seeing again that dear house. A radiant sky spread out above over all the world; the horse, in fits and starts of liveliness, sometimes went almost at a gallop. When they entered into the commune of Etouvent, Jeanne could hardly breathe, so much did her heart beat; and when she saw from a distance the brick pillars of the boundary-line of her old home, she exclaimed in a low voice two or three times, and as if in spite of herself, "Oh!-oh!-oh!" as if before things that threatened to revolutionize all her heart. They left the wagon with the Couillard family: then, while Rosalie and her son went off to attend to their business, the caretakers offered Jeanne the chance of taking a little turn around the château, the present owners of it being absent; so they gave her the keys. Alone she set out; and when she was fairly before the old manor-house by the seaside, she stopped to look at its outside once again. It had changed in nothing outside. The large, grayish building that day showed upon its old walls the smile of the sunshine. All the shutters were closed. A bit of a dead branch fell from above upon her dress. She raised her eyes. It came from the plane-tree. She drew near the big tree with its smooth, pale bark; she caressed it with her hand almost as if it had been an animal. Her foot struck something in the grass,- a fragment of rotten wood; lo! it was the last fragment of the very bench on which she had sat so often with those of her own family about her, so many years ago; the very bench which had been set in place on the same day that Julien had made his first visit. She turned then to the double doors of the vestibule of the house, and she had great trouble to open them; for the heavy key, grown rusty, refused to turn in the lock. At length the lock yielded with a heavy grinding of its springs; and the door, a little obstinate itself, gave her entrance with a cloud of dust. At once, and almost running, she went up-stairs to find what had been her own room. She could hardly recognize it, hung as it was with a light new paper: but throwing open a window, she looked out and stood motionless, stirred even to the depth of her being at the sight of all that landscape so much beloved; the thicket, the elm-trees, the flat reaches, and the sea dotted with brown sails, seeming motionless in the distance. She began prowling about the great empty, lonely dwelling. She even stopped to look at the discolorations on the walls; spots familiar to her eyes. Once she stood before a little hole crushed in the plaster by her father himself; who had often amused himself with making passages at arms, cane in hand, against the partition wall, when he would happen to be passing this spot. - Her mother's room -in it she found, stuck behind the door in a dark corner near the bed, a fine gold hairpin; one which she herself had stuck there so long ago, and which she had often tried to find during the past years. Nobody had ever come across it. She drew it out as a relic beyond all price, and kissed it, and carried it away with her. Everywhere about the house she walked, recognizing almost invisible marks in the hangings of the rooms that had not been changed; she made out once more those curious faces that a childish imagination gives often to the patterns and stuffs, to marbles, and to shadings of the ceilings, grown dingy with time. On she walked, with soundless footsteps, wholly alone in the immense, silent house, as one who crosses a cemetery. All her life was buried in it. It was sombre She went down-stairs to the drawing-room. behind the closed shutters: for some time she could not distinguish anything; then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. She recognized, little by little, the tall hangings with their patterns of birds flitting about. Two arm-chairs were set before the chimney, as if people had just quitted them; and even the odor of the room, an odor which it had always kept,- that old vague, sweet odor belonging to some old houses,-entered Jeanne's very being, enwrapt her in souvenirs, intoxicated her memory. She remained gasping, breathing in that breath of the past, and with her eyes fixed upon those two chairs; for suddenly, in a sort of hallucination which gave place to a positive idea, she saw—as she had so often seen them her father and her mother, sitting there warming their feet by the fire. She drew back terrified, struck her back against the edge of the door, caught at it to keep herself from falling, but with her eyes still fixed upon the chairs. The vision disappeared. She remained forgetful of everything during some moments; then slowly she recovered her self-possession, and would have fled from the room, fearful of losing her very senses. By chance, her glance fell against the door-post on which she chanced to be leaning; and lo! before her eyes were the marks that had been made to keep track of Poulet's height as he was growing up! The little marks climbed the painted wood with unequal intervals; figures traced with the penknife noted down the different ages and growths during the boy's life. Sometimes the jottings were in the handwriting of her father, a large hand; sometimes they were in her own smaller hand; sometimes in that of Aunt Lison, a little tremulous. It seemed to her that the child of other days was actually there, standing before her with his blond hair, pressing his little forehead against the wall so that his height could be measured; and the Baron was crying, "Why, Jeanne! he has grown a whole centimetre since six weeks ago!" She kissed the piece of wood in a frenzy of love and desolate ness. But some one was calling her from outside. It was Rosalie's voice: "Madame Jeanne, Madame Jeanne! We are waiting for you, to have luncheon.” She hurried away from the room half out of her senses. She hardly understood anything that the others said to her at luncheon. She ate the things that they put on her plate; she listened without knowing what she heard, talking mechanically with the farming-women, who inquired about her health; she let them embrace her, and herself saluted the cheeks that were held out to her; and then got into the wagon again. When the high roof of the château was lost to her sight across the trees, she felt in her very heart a direful wrench. It seemed to her in her innermost spirit that now she had said farewell forever to her old home! Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by A NORMANDY OUTING: JEAN ROLAND'S LOVE-MAKING From Pierre and Jean.' Copyright 1890, by Hugh Craig. Published by Home Book Company THE HE harvest was ripe. Beside the dull green of the clover and the bright green of the beets, the yellow stalks of wheat illuminated the plains with a tawny golden gleam. They seemed to have imbibed the sunlight that fell upon them. Here and there the reapers were at work; and in the fields attacked by the scythe the laborers were seen, swinging rhythmi cally as they swept the huge, wing-shaped blade over the surface of the ground. After a drive of two hours, the break turned to the left, passed near a windmill in motion,- a gray melancholy wreck, half rotten and condemned, the last survivor of the old mills, and then entered a pretty court-yard and drew up before a gay little house, a celebrated inn of the district. They started out, net on shoulder and basket on back. Madame Rosémilly was charming in this costume, with an unexpected, rustic, fearless style of beauty. The petticoat borrowed from Alphonsine, coquettishly raised and held by a few stitches, so as to enable the wearer to run and leap without fear among the rocks, displayed her ankle and the lower part of the calf-the firm calf of a woman at once agile and strong. Her figure was loose, to leave all her movements easy; and she had found, to cover her head, an immense gardener's hat of yellow straw, with enormous flaps, to which a sprig of tamarisk, holding one side cocked up, gave the dauntless air of a dashing mousquetaire. Jean, since receiving his legacy, had asked himself every day whether he should marry her or no. Every time he saw her, he felt decided to make her his wife; but when he was alone, he thought that meanwhile there was time to reflect. She was now not as rich as he was, for she possessed only twelve thousand francs a year;-but in real-estate farms, and lots in Havre on the docks, and these might in time be worth a large sum. Their fortunes, then, were almost equivalent; and the young widow assuredly pleased him much. As he saw her walking before him on this day, he thought, "Well, I must decide. Beyond question, I could not do better." They followed the slope of a little valley, descending from the village to the cliff; and the cliff at the end of this valley looked down on the sea from a height of nearly three hundred feet. Framed in by the green coast, sinking away to the left and right, a spacious triangle of water, silvery blue in the sunlight, was visible; and a sail, scarcely perceptible, looked like an insect down below. The sky, filled with radiance, was so blended with the water that the eye could not distinguish where one ended and the other began; and the two ladies, who were in front of the three men, cast on this clear horizon the clear outline of their compact figures. Jean, with ardent glance, saw speeding before him the enticing hat of Madame Rosémilly. Every movement urged him to those decisive resolutions which the timid and the hesitating take abruptly. The warm air, in which was blended the scent of the |