Gaspard let himself go in clear-sighted thought. They were seated on a grassy shelf that overhung the great river. The forest hemmed them in on three sides like a wedding-bower fashioned to order; but here they could follow the Rhone for miles—with its drifting barges, its red-sailed shallops, its hamlets, and villages.
"Yes, ever like the Rhone," he said; "but growing, like the Rhone, until it's broad and majestic and strong to carry burdens—"
Susette interrupted him.
"Kiss me," she said. "Kiss me again. No—not like that; like you did a while ago."
And Gaspard, laughing, did as he was bidden. But what was that silver glint of something like a regret, something like a loss, that came fluttering once more across the atmosphere of his thought? Susette, though, kept him diverted. She was forever popping in upon his reflections with innocent, childish questions; and he found this infinitely amusing.
"Did you desire me—more than the princess?"
"Beloved, I have desired you for years."
"Did you think me more beautiful—than she?"
Again Gaspard laughed; but it set him to thinking. He liked to think. He thought at his forge, at his meals, nights when he happened to be awake.
"Love and beauty," he said, "these are created by desire. As a stone-cutter desires what is hidden in the rock, and hews it out and loves the thing he shapes, though it be as ugly as a gargoyle, because of the desire that brought it forth—"