Page:Des Grieux, The Prelude to Teleny.djvu/14

 all life had come to a stand-still in that sluggish town. Save the shrill chirp of the tree-crickets, jubilant amongst the sere dust-covered leaves of the lime-trees, not the slightest sound was heard.

Most of the shutters were as tightly shut as in the dead of the night; the town looked uninhabited. Alone, a young girl, leaning on the broad window-sill of an old stone mansion, was gazing dreamily down on the space below.

"But why was the young girl looking out of the window?" yon evidently ask.

Why? Spinoza said, long ago that "we do not know the causes that determine our actions," so, I dare say, the young girl herself did not know why she had gone to look out of the window in tho glowing sunshine.

The house in question, built at the time of Francis the First, in the purest Renaissance style—if the Rococo can be termed a pure style—was now one of broken fortunes; it was perhaps only the more picturesque thereby, because its mistress, in her comparatively impoverished state, had never