—Boulevardé.
HE momentous day had come. Looking out of my bedroom window in the morning, I saw the sunshine smiling on the bare trees and the frosted grass of the park. At that hour the shadows were long, and Rotten Row quiet as a lonely sea-shore, so that a lively flock of sparrows seemed to fill the whole air with their cheerful discussions, and I fancied they were debating whether they could let me go away and leave forever this little home that I had made.
“I would stay,” I said to them; “I would stay if I could.”
But, alas! it was to be my last day in England, the land I had first regarded as so alien, and then come to love so well. And there was no use standing here letting my spirit run down at heel.
Yet, when I came into my sitting-room and saw the bareness that had already been made by my preparations for departure, the absence of little things my eye had before fallen upon without noticing, and the presence of a half-packed box in one corner, my heart began to feel an emptiness again.
“I feel as a man must when he is going to get married,” I said to myself, and endeavored to smile gayly at my humor.
Hardly had I finished my breakfast, endeavoring as I read as usual my morning paper to forget that I was leaving all this, when I heard a quick step in the passage, and with a brisk, “Bon jour, monsieur!” the Marquis entered.