light lying still on the waves and undulation of her hair.
Renouard fancied himself overturning the table, smashing crystal
and china, treading fruit and flowers under foot, seizing her in
his arms, carrying her off in a tumult of shrieks from all these
people, a silent frightened mortal, into some profound retreat as
in the age of Cavern men. Suddenly everybody got up, and he
hastened to rise too, finding himself out of breath and quite
unsteady on his feet.

On the terrace the philosopher, after lighting a cigar, slipped his
hand condescendingly under his "dear young friend's" arm. Renouard
regarded him now with the profoundest mistrust. But the great man
seemed really to have a liking for his young friend--one of those
mysterious sympathies, disregarding the differences of age and
position, which in this case might have been explained by the
failure of philosophy to meet a very real worry of a practical
kind.

After a turn or two and some casual talk the professor said
suddenly: "My late son was in your school--do you know? I can
imagine that had he lived and you had ever met you would have
understood each other. He too was inclined to action."

He sighed, then, shaking off the mournful thought and with a nod at
the dusky part of the terrace where the dress of his daughter made
a luminous stain: "I really wish you would drop in that quarter a
few sensible, discouraging words."

Renouard disengaged himself from that most perfidious of men under
the pretence of astonishment, and stepping back a pace -