meat to boil with his beans and lentils in the soup-pot."
She only laughed.
"It was worth nothing," she answered me.
I picked up the poor little broken plaything in the street below, and put the pieces aside and kept them. It was only the carelessness of her youth and of her sex, I told myself. But for the first time that day there seemed to me a dissonance in the chiming bells and the murmuring streams, a shadow on the sparkling sunshine, a taint in the sweet young summer odours of the wood-clothed hills.
Why should she value my love, I thought, more than the little broken fan? It was hardly worth more to her in any sense of wealth.
IV.
We were to stay in the town whilst its season lasted. This had scarcely begun when we entered it. There were very few persons arrived then, and I had plenty of leisure time, in which I took her to spend the hours in the shady alleys of the hills and under the deep foliage of the winding woodland roads, taking our noonday meal most often under the trees of Géronstère.
There were two or three of the artists of my
