"You have not yet given me the right to obey you when you say, 'I wish
it.'"

"At this moment," she said, with an exhibition of coquetry of the sort
that drives men to despair, "I have a most violent desire to know this
secret. To-morrow it may be that I will not listen to you."

She smiled and we parted, she still as proud and as cruel, I as
ridiculous, as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young
aide-de-camp, and I was by turns angry, sulky, admiring, loving,
and jealous.

"Until to-morrow," she said to me, as she left the ball about two
o'clock in the morning.

"I won't go," I thought. "I give up. You are a thousand times more
capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination."

The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty
little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet,
looking up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft
light. It was one of those evenings which delight the soul, one of
those moments which are never forgotten, one of those hours passed in
peace and longing, whose charm is always in later years a source of
regret, even when we are happier. What can efface the deep imprint of
the first solicitations of love?

"Go on," she said. "I am listening."