The American girl had sometimes speculated upon what might have been the appearance of the lime-tree walk, dotted with these gayly plumaged folk, and wondered if the tyranny of environment had at last subdued their brilliant colors.  And a new feeling touched her.  Like most of her countrywomen, she was strongly affected by the furniture of life; the thought that all that she saw there might be hers; that she might yet stand in succession to these strange courtiers and stranger shepherdesses, and, like them, look down from the canvas upon the intruding foreigner, thrilled her for a moment with a half-proud, half-passive sense of yielding to what seemed to be her fate.  A narrow-eyed, stiff-haired Dutch maid of honor before whom she was standing gazed at her with staring vacancy.  Suddenly she started.  Before the portrait upon a fanciful easel stood a small elaborately framed sketch in oils.  It was evidently some recently imported treasure.  She had not seen it before.  As she moved quickly forward, she recognized at a glance that it was Ostrander’s sketch from the Paris grenier.

The wall, the room, the park beyond, even the gray sky, seemed to fade away before her.  She was standing once more at her attic window looking across the roofs and chimney stacks upward to the blue sky of Paris.  Through a gap in the roofs she could see the chestnut-trees trilling in the little square; she could hear the swallows twittering in the leaden troughs of the gutter before her; the call of the chocolate vender or the cry of a gamin floated up to her from the street below, or the latest song of the cafe chantant was whistled by the blue-bloused workman on the scaffolding hard by.  The breath of Paris, of youth, of blended work and play, of ambition, of joyous freedom, again filled her and mingled with the scent of the mignonette that used to stand on the old window-ledge.

“I am glad you like it.  I have only just put it up.”

It was the voice of Sir James—­a voice that had regained a little of its naturalness—­a calm, even lazy English voice—­confident from the experience of years of respectful listeners.  Yet it somehow jarred upon her nerves with its complacency and its utter incongruousness to her feelings.  Nevertheless, the impulse to know more about the sketch was the stronger.

“Do you mean you have just bought it?” asked Helen.  “It’s not English?”

“No,” said Sir James, gratified with his companion’s interest.  “I bought it in Paris just after the Commune.”

“From the artist?” continued Helen, in a slightly constrained voice.

“No,” said Sir James, “although I knew the poor chap well enough.  You can easily see that he was once a painter of great promise.  I rather think it was stolen from him while he was in hospital by those incendiary wretches.  I recognized it, however, and bought for a few francs from them what I would have paid him a thousand for.”