"It is a pity we show so soon that our tastes are so entirely different. However, you will excuse me if I say it is your fault. Now, I prize this walk back just for the reason you assign for disliking it. You find it long because I am with you, and I will find it short just because you are with me."
Such words as these went straight to Fifine's susceptible heart; her most exaggerated dreams had never led her this far. She looked at him doubtfully, but it was no dream, she was actually leaning on the strong arm of a live man, listening to words, such as the most devoted Romeo might address to his idolized Juliet.
"But if I must agree with you," she said, "I must still disagree with myself, remembering that while I may never see you again, I must live all my life with myself. Besides I wonder if I could enjoy anything; that word was surely not made for me, I have never known it yet."
She was skilled as any adventuress in the art of captivating. If confidence and a recital of petty woes, from the tempting lips of a fatally beautiful girl, do not appeal most strongly to a man's heart, nothing will. Besides, consider the influence of circumstances. When that pretty girl and you are wholly isolated from every other man and pretty girl in creation, and she is making you realize by her dependence on you, how easily wrongs are righted, and how much strength there is in that strong arm of yours, who is to answer for the consequences? Men are such one sided creatures, they either lean all over on the heart side or altogether on the other. If their extravagance is the former, you can do anything you like with them, if you only go the right way about it, whilst if the other prevail, it is a hopeless case of barrenness against all your best endeavors. Fortunately most young men of our day lose balance on the left side and give all up to their intense emotions. They have never learned the A B C of self-denial, and they make an act of resignation first and then plunge into trouble.
Fifine's enthusiastic admirer felt at this moment like opening his heart, and closing her up in its safe fetters forevermore, and I fancy Fifine would as soon have had it as any other nook at the present moment, but neither spoke of it. They were making slow progress along their homeward path, and the suggestive surroundings and interesting circumstances were too much for the unsuspecting girl. She burst into a lively strain of confidence extracted by the answer her companion made to her last despairing remark about enjoying herself.
"My dear young lady, what has Fortune, so very partial to you in all things, left undone in your enviable life?"
There was so much of seeming pathos in his voice that Fifine could not doubt the implied sincerity of his tone, so she unsealed the secrets of her life, telling him all, except the unhappy cause which forced her father to bring her into such entire seclusion.
Many of my readers must have guessed, by now, that he whom the students at the Travellers' Inn called "Bijou," and he who is now making desperate love to Fifine de Maistre, are identical.
Just as the "boys" had said, "the Prince" was sure to break the spell, that fettered the life of the beautiful recluse. He had been on his way to her father, to seek his permission for himself and his fellow students to pass through his grounds, when all at once a new experience presented itself and he found himself talking all sorts of nice nonsense, to a "deuced pretty girl."
It is needless to dwell on the details of the first meeting between those two. Fifine had thought it wiser to leave her charming escort at the rustic gate, insinuating that he might come at any other time to visit her father, and that there was no necessity to speak of what had transpired in the wood.