Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/213

 The vine had said that at the club round the corner he was very eloquent, with all the impassioned and fierce eloquence common to men of the south. But with Lili he was almost mute. The vine, who knew human nature well—as vines always do, since their juices unlock the secret thoughts of men and bring to daylight their darkest passions—the wine said that such silence, in one by nature eloquent, showed the force of his love and its delicacy.

This may be so; I hardly know. My lover the wind, when he is amorous, is loud, but then it is true his loves are not often very constant.

René chiefly wooed her by gentle service. He brought her little lovely wild flowers, for which he ransacked the woods of St. Germain's and Meudon. He carried the billets of her fire-wood up the seven long, twisting, dirty flights of stairs. He fought for her with the wicked old porteress at the door down stairs. He played to her in the grey of the evening on a quaint simple flute, a relic of his boyhood, the sad, wild, touching airs of his own southern mountains—played at his open window while the lamps burned through the dusk, till the people listened at their doors and easements, and gathered in groups in the passage below, and said to one another, "How clever he is!—and yet he starves."