pretty sleeper from time to time heaved vague and inarticulate sighs like one about to wake; then the young. cavalier would stop and wait until sleep had again overpowered him. The boots yielded at last, this was the most important; the stockings offered only a slight resistance.
This operation accomplished, the master took both the child's feet and laid them beside each other on the velvet of the sofa; they were quite the most adorable pair of feet in the world, as small as could be, as white as new ivory and a little rosy from the pressure of the boots in which they had been imprisoned for seventeen hours- feet too small for a woman, and which looked as though they had never walked; what was seen of the leg was round, plump, smooth, transparent, veiny, and most exquisitely delicate; a leg worthy of the foot.
The young man, who was still on his knees, regarded these two little feet with loving and admiring attention; he bent down, took the left one and kissed it, then the right and kissed it also; and then with kisses after kisses he went back along the leg as far as the place where the cloth began. The page raised his long eyelash a little, and cast upon his master a kind and drowsy look in which no surprise was apparent. “My belt is uncomfortable,” he said, passing his finger beneath the ribbon, and fell asleep again. The master unfastened the belt, raised the page's head with a cushion, and touching his feet which, burning as they were before, had become rather cold, wrapped them up carefully in his cloak, took an easy-chair and sat down as close as possible to the sofa. Two hours passed in this way, the young man looking at the sleeping child and following the shadows of his dreams upon his brow. The only noise that was heard in the room was his regular breathing and the tick-tack of the clock.
It was certainly a very graceful picture. There was a means for effect in the contrast of these two kinds of beauty that a skilful painter would have turned to good account. The master was as beautiful as a woman, the page as beautiful as a young girl. The round and rosy head, set thus in its hair, looked like a peach beneath its leaves; it was as fresh and as velvety, though the fatigue of the journey had robbed it of a little of its usual brilliance; the half-opened mouth showed little teeth of milky whiteness, and beneath his full and glossy temples a network of azure veins crossed one another; his eyelashes, which were like the golden threads that are spread round the heads of virgins in the missals, reached nearly to the middle of his cheeks; his long and silky hair resembled both gold and silver-gold in the shade and silver in the light; his neck was at once fat and frail, and had nothing of the sex that was indicated by his dress: two or three buttons, unfastened to facilitate respiration, allowed a lozenge of plump and rounded flesh of wonderful whiteness to be seen through the hiatus in a shirt of fine Holland linen, as well as the beginning of a certain curving line difficult of explanation on the bosom of a young boy; looking carefully at him it might also have been found that his hips were a little too much developed.
The reader may draw his own conclusions; we are offering him mere conjectures. We know as little of the matter as he does, but we hope to know more after a time, and we promise to faithfully keep him aware of our discoveries. If the reader's sight is better than ours, let his glance penetrate beneath the lace on that shirt and decide conscientiously whether the outline is too prominent or not prominent enough; but we warn him that the curtains are drawn, and that a twilight scarcely favorable for investigations of the kind reigns in the room.
The cavalier was pale, but of a golden paleness full of vigor and life; his pupils swam in a blue, crystalline humor; his straight and delicate nose imparted wonderful pride and energy to his profile, and its flesh was so fine that at the edge of the outline it suffered the light to pierce through; his mouth had, at certain moments, the sweetest of smiles, but usually it was arched at the corners, inwards rather than outwards, like some of the heads that we see in the pictures of the old Italian masters; and this gave him a little look of adorable disdain, a most piquant smorfia, an air of childish pouting and ill-humor, which was very singular and very charming.
What were the ties uniting master to page and page to master? There was assuredly something more between them than the affection which may exist between master and servant. Were they two friends or two brothers? If so, why this disguise? It would at all events have been difficult for any one who had witnessed the scene that we have just described to believe that these two personages were in reality only what they appeared to be.
“The dear angel, how he sleeps!” said the young man in a low voice; “I don't think that he has ever travelled so far in his life. Twenty leagues on horseback, he who is so delicate! I am afraid that he will be ill from fatigue. But no, it will be nothing; there will be no sign of it to-morrow; he will have recovered his beautiful color, and be fresher than a rose after rain. How beautiful he is, so! If I were not afraid of awaking him, I would eat him up with caresses. What an adorable dimple he has on his chin! what delicacy and whiteness of skin! Sleep well, dear treasure. Ah! I am truly jealous of your mother and I wish that I had made you. He is not ill? No; his breathing is regular, and he does not stir. But I think some one knocked-”
And indeed two little taps had been given as softly as possible on the panel of the door.
The young man rose, and, fearing that he was mistaken, delayed opening until there should be another knock. Two other taps, a little more accentuated, were heard again, and a woman's soft voice said in a very low tone: “It is I, Theodore.”
Theodore opened the door, but with less eagerness than is usual with a young man opening to a young woman with a gentle voice who comes scratching mysteriously at his door towards nightfall. The folding door, being half-opened, gave passage to whom, think you? — to the mistress of the perplexed D'Albert, the Princess Rosette in person, rosier than her name, and her bosom as moved as was ever that of a woman entering at evening the room of a handsome cavalier.
“Theodore!” said Rosette.
Theodore raised his finger and laid it on his lips, so that he looked like a statue of silence, and, showing her the sleeping child, conducted her into the next room.
“Theodore,” resumed Rosette, who seemed to find singular pleasure in repeating the name, and to be seeking at the same time to collect her ideas. “Theodore,” she continued, without releasing the hand which the young man had offered to her to lead her to an easy-chair, “so you have at last come back to us? What have you been doing all this time? where have you been? Do you know that I have not seen you for six months? Ah, Theodore, that is not well; some consideration and some pity is due to those who love us, even though we do not love them.”
Theodore-“What have I been doing? I do not know. I have come and gone, slept and waked, wept and sung, I have been hungry and thirsty, too hot and too cold, I have been weary, I have less money, and am six months older, I have been living and that is all. And you, what have you been doing?”
Rosette-“I have been loving you.”
Theodore-“You have done nothing else?”
Rosette-“Absolutely nothing else. I have been employing my time badly, have I not?”
Theodore-“You might have employed it better, my poor Rosette; for instance, in loving some one who could return your love.”
Rosette-“I am disinterested in love, as I am in everything. I do not lend love on usury; I give it as a pure gift.”
Theodore-“That is a very rare virtue, and one which can only spring up in a chosen soul. I have often wished to be able to love you, at least in the way that you would like; but there is an insurmountable obstacle between us which I cannot explain to you. Have you had another lover since I left you?”
Rosette-“I have had one whom I have still.”
Theodore-“What sort of man is he?”
Rosette-“A poet.”
Theodore-“The devil! what kind of a poet, and what has he written?”
Rosette-“I do not quite know; a sort of volume that nobody is acquainted with, and that I tried to read one evening.”
Theodore-“So you have an unknown poet for your lover. That must be curious. Has he holes at his elbows, dirty linen, and stockings like the screw of a press?”
Rosette-“No; he dresses pretty well, washes his hands, and has no inkspots on the tip of his nose. He is a friend of C-'s; I met him at Madame de Themines's house; you know a big woman who acts the child and puts on little innocent airs.”
Theodore-“And might one know the name of this glorious personage?”
Rosette-“Oh, dear, yes! He is called the Chevalier D'Albert.”
Theodore-“The Chevalier D'Albert! It seems to me that he is the young man who was on the balcony when I, was dismounting.
Rosette-“Exactly.”
