"Forget! when all I shall have will be my memories--!"

"Yes," she said, "we shall both have memories..." And suddenly the
rich, deep voice quoted in English: "'Memories like almighty wine.'"

She offered to disengage her hand, but Duchemin tightened gently the
pressure of his fingers, bowing over it and, as he looked up for her
answer, murmuring: "With permission?" She gave the slightest
inclination of her head. His lips touched her hand for a moment; then
he released it. She went swiftly to the door, faltered, turned.

"We shall see each other in the morning--to say au revoir. With us,
monsieur, it must never be adieu."

She was gone; but she had left Duchemin with a singing heart that would
not let him sleep when he had gone to bed, stared blankly at the last
chapter of Bragelonne for an hour, and put out his candle.

Till long after midnight he tossed restlessly, bedevilled alternately
by melancholy and exhilaration, or lay staring blindly into the
darkness, striving to focus his thoughts upon the abstract, a hopeless
effort; trying to think where to go to-morrow, whither to turn his feet
when the gates of Paradise had closed behind him, and knowing it did
not matter, he did not care, that hereafter one place and another would
be the same to him, so that they were not the place of her abode.

The château was as still as any castle of enchantment; only an old
clock in the drawing room, two floors below, tolled the slow hours; and
through the open windows came the mournful murmur of the river, a voice