tingling.

Next morning the shy and melancholy stranger went past with a look of
deep preoccupation, but he could not escape Caroline's gratitude; she
had opened her window and affected to be digging in the square window-
box buried in snow, a pretext of which the clumsy ingenuity plainly
told her benefactor that she had been resolved not to see him only
through the pane. Her eyes were full of tears as she bowed her head,
as much as to say to her benefactor, "I can only repay you from my
heart."

But the Gentleman in Black affected not to understand the meaning of
this sincere gratitude. In the evening, as he came by, Caroline was
busy mending the window with a sheet of paper, and she smiled at him,
showing her row of pearly teeth like a promise. Thenceforth the
Stranger went another way, and was no more seen in the Rue due
Tourniquet.



It was one day early in the following May that, as Caroline was giving
the roots of the honeysuckle a glass of water, one Saturday morning,
she caught sight of a narrow strip of cloudless blue between the black
lines of houses, and said to her mother:

"Mamma, we must go to-morrow for a trip to Montmorency!"

She had scarcely uttered the words, in a tone of glee, when the
Gentleman in Black came by, sadder and more dejected than ever.
Caroline's innocent and ingratiating glance might have been taken for