The Argosy — page 392: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

370 Aunt Félicté. Tum aucer. could extract ; and at the shops, they shrugged their shoulders, and knew nothing about people who lived in the Rue Puits d’Amour. It was a ternble fact—and Seton knew it; he had fallen headlong into a passion for a girl of whom he knew nothing. Her face, her whole conduct, vouched for her purity ; until to-day he had not even spoken to her, for she left her window almost as soon as he appeared at his; and he had not succeeded till this morning in meeting her in the street, spite of the incessant watch he kept on her movements. Suddenly a new idea quickened within him—he would go back to the market-place and find old Elodie; he should learn from her all he wanted to know. He sprang up, and hastened down the slippery grass- slope with a speed that made him inclined to smile at himself. The market-place was empty ; a few ragged children were prowling among the refuse ; a few dropped flowers marked where Elodie’s flower-pots had stood, but she and her donkey-cart had departed. Mademoiselle Félicité Trudin was still a very handsome woman— though at thirty-five a Frenchwoman is older than 1s an Englishwoman at the same epoch, especially when she is of Feélicité’s type. Large deep brown eyes, regular features, a clear olive skin, and -abundant braids of glossy hair, made a picture-face, to which the depth of pas- sionate expression gave brilliant effects of light and shade. The shade predominated as she sat by her bedroom window, resting her cheek on the slender fingers of one hand, while the other played with the braid chain suspended from her neck. The annoyance that shadowed her came from within; outwardly there was only what she looked on every day—a bricked court-yard below, half built over by the one-storied rooms of her lodgers, a tailor and his family. The leaded roof of their apartment Madmoiselle used as a flower-garden; and across it she could have walked, had she chosen, into the first-floor back windows of the Hétel de Pans. Her look-out was not half so picturesque and varied as that of the English tourists and French families bound for “ les eaux,” who chanced to sojourn in this pleasant little hotel, in one of the most charming and cleanest of Norman towns. She saw nothing but tiers of windows opening one above another, with their muslin draperies and clumsy fastenings—monotonons compared with the variety opposite. To begin with the court-yard. Monsieur and Madame Leroux might be seen in early morning in various stages of their toilette, and on two days of the week stock- ings and garments, many-coloured and multiform, hung from strings stretched, zig-zag fashion, from the sides of the leads to the wall opposite. The leads themselves were rich in colour. Mademoiselle Félicité loved flowers, and knew how to grow them too. Her oleanders and scarlet geraniums did her credit, and her myrtles and fuchsias, those COMIC OOOKS. EO mn _