O, as for him, he intended to stay a week or two longer, finish a bit of medical treatment and take advantage of the quiet which their departure would afford him in order to write that famous speech. It would make a tremendous row, the news of which they would get at Paris. By George! Le Quesnoy would not like it much!
Then all of a sudden, Hortense, though ready to leave, and notwithstanding she was happy at returning home to see the beloved absent ones whom distance made even more dear to her—for her imagination reached even to her heart—Hortense suddenly felt sorrow at leaving this beautiful country and all the hotel society and her friends of three weeks, to whom she had no idea she had become so much attached. Ah, ye loving natures! how you give yourselves out! how everything grasps you and then what pain ensues when breaking these invisible yet sensitive threads!
People had been so kind to her, so full of attention; and at the last hour so many outstretched hands pressed about the carriage, so many tender expressions! Young girls would kiss her: “We shall have no more fun without you.” Then they promised to write to each other and exchanged mementos, sweet-smelling boxes and paper-cutters made of mother-of-pearl with this inscription in a shimmering blue like the lakes: “Arvillard, 1876.” And while M. Laugeron slipped a bottle of superfine Chartreuse into her travelling-sack, she saw, up there behind the pane of her chamber window, the mountaineer’s wife who had been her servant dabbing her eyes with an enormous handkerchief of the color of wine-lees and heard a husky voice murmur in her ear: “Plenty of spring, my dear young lady, always plenty of spring!” It was her friend the consumptive, who, having jumped up on the wheel, poured out upon her a look of good-bye from two haggard and feverish eyes, but eyes sparkling with energy, will and a bit of emotion besides. O, what kind people! what kind people!...
Hortense could not speak for fear of crying.
“Good-bye, good-bye, all!”
The Minister accompanied the ladies as far as the distant railway station and took his seat in front of them. Crack goes the whip, jingle go the bells! All of a sudden Hortense cries out:
“Oh, my umbrella!” She had had it in her hand not a moment before. Twenty people rush off to find it: “The umbrella, the umbrella”—not in the bedroom, not in the drawing-room; doors slam; the hotel is searched from top to bottom.
“Don’t look for it; I know where it is.”
Always lively, the young girl jumps out of the carriage and runs to the garden, toward the grove of walnuts, where even that morning she had been adding several chapters to the romance that was being written in her crazy little head. There lay the umbrella, thrown across the bench, a bit of herself left in that favorite spot, something which was very like her. What delicious hours had been passed in this nook of rich verdure! what confidences had gone off on the wings of the bees and butterflies! Without a doubt she would never return thither again. This thought caused her heart to contract and kept her there. At that moment she found everything charming, even the long grinding sound of the swing.
“Get out! you make me weary—”