2
I rose from my seat with a happy heart. The time had come for me to go in search of her. I would kiss her in all gratitude. Had she not enlarged my will to the extent of making it admit her little existence?
I went through the silent streets, in search of the charming, old-world name that was to tell me where the aged spinster lived. Rose had said that I should see it written over the door in blue letters and that it was opposite a place where they sold sportsmen's and anglers' requisites, a shop with a sign that would be certain to attract my attention.
I therefore walked along with a sure step and suddenly, at a street-corner, saw a great silver fish flashing to and fro in the breeze at the end of a long line. Soon I was in a quiet backwater of the town. There it was! Opposite me, the last gleams of the setting sun shed their radiance on a very bright little house covered with a luxuriant vine. On one side, in the same golden light, the name of Isaline Coquet smiled in sky-blue letters.
The shop was white, with pearl-grey shutters; and on the ledges were bunchy plants gay with pink, starry flowers. In the window, a few starched caps looked as if they were talking scandal on their respective stands.
I walked in. The opening of the door roused the tongue of a little rusty bell, but nobody came. On a big grandfather's chair, near the counter, were a pair of spectacles and a book. Perhaps Mlle. Coquet had run away when she caught sight of me through the panes; Rose said that she was shy and a little frightened at the thought of my coming visit. And I had the pleasure of looking for my Rose as I followed the mysterious turns of a primitive passage.
The walls were spotless and the red-tiled floor shone in the half-light. I crossed a neat little kitchen, just as a cuckoo-clock was chiming five, and found myself on the threshold of a small room opening on a garden. Rose was sitting in the wide, low window.
The noise of the clock no doubt deadened the sound of my steps, for the girl did not turn her head. The room exhaled a faint perfume as of incense and musk; and I seemed to hold all her peaceful little life in my breath and in that swift glance. All that I could see of her face was one cheek and the tips of her long eyelashes. Placed as she was in front of the light, a golden haze shaded the colours of her beautiful hair; and I lingered in contemplation of the long and graceful curve of her figure bending over her work. She was sewing in the midst of floods of stiff white muslin, which formed a chain of snow-clad peaks with blue reflections around her. I looked at the low-ceilinged room with its whitewashed wall and its rows of bodices, petticoats and shiny caps hanging on lines stretched from one side to the other. A grey tom-cat lay purring on a corner of the table; and, near it, in a well-scrubbed pot, a pink geranium displayed its sombre leaves and its bright flowers.
Rose was sewing. At regular intervals, her right arm rose, drew out the thread and returned to the spot whence it started: an even and captive movement symbolical of the amount of activity permitted to women! But was she not to choose that movement among all others?