“This year summer was late. We had to wait a long time for it.”
“Ever so long. But now it has come at last.”
“It has come....” Anne said nothing more and looked suddenly sideways at Illey. She felt uneasy. He seemed again quite strange to her. He whom she had seen in the glen behind the cemetery had been handsomer and more attractive. Thomas Illey’s sharp, lean face gave the lie to her memory.
The trees became sparser. They came to a meadow. Illey took his hat off. The sun shone on his face.
Anne stopped, her eyes became large and blue as if filled to the brim with the sky and her memory melted for one instant into reality. Now she could not understand how it had been possible for her to think that Illey had been changed by her imagination. He was his own self ... exactly like the one she had not forgotten. His dark hair shone. His noble head curved in a fine line into his neck, like a thoroughbred’s. Anne’s eyes caressed him timidly. That was not the broad muscular nape of the Ulwings. The lords of Ille had never carried heavy loads.
She saw what she had believed was lost. And as she passed by his side, she felt as if a ripple of trembling, happy laughter pervaded her and rose to her lips and filled her eyes.
The restraint in her melted away. After all, they had known each other for a long time. They had so much to tell each other.
Thomas Illey also talked more freely.
Anne learned that his parents were no longer living; that he was born down south on the banks of the Danube, on the lands of Ille. Far away, in a big country house where one’s footsteps echoed under old portraits. The garden looked in through the windows. One could hear the Danube and, in autumn mists, the horn of the chase. In the tillage silver-white oxen with wide horns, behind them farmer serfs of Ille as if all had risen from the furrow.
All this was foreign and curious to Anne, but she liked to listen to Illey’s voice. Only gradually did she begin to feel that what he talked about absorbed him entirely as if it dragged him away from her side on the shady path. If that were true! If he really happened to go away! She asked him spontaneously;