"Ah, yes," he said, "it is she!" He drew over his face the cape of his mantle, and disappeared as completely as it is possible to disappear when one is perched upon a hillock.

It was six years since he had seen this woman, and he had promised himself never to see her again; but man is the plaything of circumstances, and his happiness as well as his pride is at the mercy of a chance encounter.

Count Abel was no longer proud; for some moments he had humbled himself, he had ceased to exist.
Happily he discovered that he had not been recognised; that the woman of sixty years of age was not looking his way.

She had good taste; discovering the hideous aspect of the country, which is usually known as the Vallee du Diable, she had opened a volume, bound in morocco, which her waiting-woman had placed in her hands.

This volume was not a new novel; it was a German book, entitled "The History of Civilization, viewed in Accordance with the Doctrines of Evolution, from the most Remote Period to the Present Day." She neither had made much progress in the pages of the book nor in the history of civilization; she had not got beyond the age of stone or of bronze; she was still among primitive animal life, among the protozoa, the monads, the infusoria, the vibratiles--in the age of albumen, or gelatinous civilization, as it was called by the author, the sagacity of whose views charmed her.