Oh, unutterable joys of requited love; insatiable intoxication of the heart transported with happiness; never-ending delights of the uncurbed imagination; sweet music of the heart,—to what ethereal heights have you not raised the chosen ones, given up to your supreme felicities! Suddenly forgetful of this lower world, they fly on outstretched wings to some enchanted paradise, lose themselves in celestial depths, and soar away to the sublime regions of eternal rapture. The world, with its joys and its sorrows, no longer exists for them; they live in light, in fire,—they are salamanders, phœnixes, freed from all weight, light as flame, burning themselves out, rising again from their ashes, always luminous, always ardent, invulnerable, invincible.
The expansion of their first long-repressed delights threw the lovers into an ecstatic existence in which metaphysics and its problems were for a time forgotten. This lasted six months. The sweetest but most imperious of feelings had suddenly absorbed and taken possession of them, thus completing the insufficient intellectual satisfactions of the mind. From the day of the kiss, George Spero not only entirely disappeared from society, but even ceased to write; and I lost sight of him myself, notwithstanding the long and true affection he had professed for me. Logicians might have been able to conclude from this that for the first time in his life he was satisfied that he had found the solution of the great problem,—the supreme object of the existence of beings.
They were living in this "selfishness for two" which, while moving mankind from our optic centre, diminishes its defects and makes it appear more beautiful. Satisfied by their mutual affection, everything in nature and humanity sang a perpetual hymn of happiness and love. Often in the evening they walked along the banks of the Seine, dreamily contemplating the effects of light and shade which make the sky of Paris so exquisite at twilight, when the silhouettes of towers and buildings are thrown out against the luminous background in the west. Piles of rose-colored and purple clouds, illuminated by the distant reflection of the sea over which the vanished sun is still shining, give our skies a character of their own, not like that of Naples, bathed in the west by the Mediterranean mirror, but surpassing Venice perhaps, whose illumination is pale and eastern. It might chance that, their steps having led them to the old island of the Cité, they would stroll along the river bank, passing in sight of Notre Dame and the old Châtelet, whose dark outlines might still be seen against the dimly lighted sky. Sometimes, often indeed, enticed by the brilliance of the setting sun and by the fresh green of the country, they went along the quais, out beyond the ramparts of the great city, and strayed as far as the solitudes of Boulogne or Billancourt, shut in between the dusky hills of Meudon and Saint-Cloud. They were contemplating Nature; they forgot the noisy city lost behind them; and walking with the same step, forming but one being, they received the same impressions, thought the same thoughts, and by their silence spoke the same language. The stream flowed on at their feet, the noises of the day were dying away, the first stars were peeping out. Icléa liked to tell George their names as they appeared.
March and April often offer Paris mild evenings, on which the first warm breezes, forerunners of spring, greet us. Orion's brilliant stars, the dazzling Sirius, the Twins, Castor and Pollux glitter in the immense sky; the Pleiades sink towards the western horizon; but Arcturus and Boötes, shepherd of the celestial flocks, return, and a few hours later white and resplendent Vega rises on the eastern horizon, soon followed by the Milky Way. Arcturus with its golden rays is always the first star to be recognized, from its piercing brilliancy and from its position in the prolongation of the tail of the Great Bear. Sometimes the lunar crescent was hanging in the western sky, and the young girl gazed admiringly, like Ruth by Boaz' side, at "that golden sickle in the field of stars."
The stars surround the earth, the earth is in the sky. Spero and his companion realized this, and perhaps no other couple on any other celestial earth lived on more intimate terms than they with the sky and infinity.
And yet by degrees, perhaps without noticing it himself, the young philosopher was gradually taking up again by shattered fragments his interrupted studies; analyzing subjects now with a deep feeling of optimism which he had never known before, in spite of his natural kindliness; excluding cruel conclusions because they seemed to him to be due to an insufficient knowledge of causes, looking at the panoramas of Nature and of humanity in a new light. She too had taken up, at least partially, the studies which she had begun in common with him; but a new feeling filled her soul, and her mind had not the same freedom for intellectual work. Absorbed in this constant affection for a being whom she had wholly won, she saw only through him, acted only by him. In quiet evening hours, when she went to the piano and played a sonata by Chopin, which she was astonished to find she had not understood until she was in love, or to accompany her pure rich voice while singing the Norwegian lieder by Grieg or Bull, or our own Gounod's melodies, it seemed to her, unconsciously perhaps, that her lover was the only listener capable of appreciating these inspirations of the heart. What delicious hours he spent, stretched on a divan in that spacious library in the house at Passy, sometimes idly following the capricious rings of smoke from a Turkish cigarette, while she gave herself up to fanciful memories, singing the sweet Saetergientens Sondag of her native land, the serenade from "Don Juan," Lamartine's "Lake," or else when running her skilful fingers over the keys she sent the melodious dream of Boccherini's minuet floating into the air.
Spring had come. May had brought the opening fêtes at the Universal Exhibition of which we spoke at the beginning of this story, and the great trees in the garden at Passy shaded the Eden of the loving couple. Icléa's father, who had suddenly been called to Tunis, returned with a collection of Arabian arms for his museum at Christiania. He intended to go back to Norway very soon, and it had been agreed between the young Norwegian girl and her lover that the marriage should take place in her native land on the anniversary of the mysterious apparition.
