“Yes, yes, I know—I am coming down.”
She ran up to her room and locked the door in order not to be interfered with. Opening her desk, one of those natty trifles by the aid of which a Parisian woman can make personal to herself even the chamber of an inn, she pulled out one of the photographs of herself which she had had taken in the head-dress and scarf of an Arles woman, wrote a line underneath it and affixed her name. Whilst she was putting on the address the bell in the tower of Arvillard sounded the hour across the sombre violet that filled the valley, as if to give solemnity to what she had dared to do.
“Six o’clock.”
From the torrent the mist was rising in wandering and flaky masses of white. In the amphitheatre of forests and mountains and the silver plume of the glacier, in the rose-colored evening, she took note of the smallest details of that silent and reposeful moment, just as on the calendar one marks some single date among all others; just as in a book one underscores a passage which has caused one emotion; dreaming aloud she said:
“It is my life, my entire life I am risking at this moment.”
She took as witness the solemnity of the evening, the majesty of nature, the tremendous repose of everything about her.
Her entire life that she was engaging? Poor little girl! if she had only known how little that was!
A few days after this the Le Quesnoy ladies left the hotel, Hortense’s treatment having ended. Although reassured by the healthy look of her child and by what the little doctor said concerning the miracle performed by the nymph of the waters, her mother was only too glad to have done with that life, which in its smallest details recalled to her a past martyrdom.
“And how about you, Numa?”