The comfort of it all smote them alike. The conversation soon became forced, then ceased, leaving each silently immersed in thought.
But Mlle. Fouchette welcomed this interval of silence with a satisfaction inexpressible. She, too, was under the spell of the place and the occasion. Mlle. Fouchette was not a sentimental woman, as we have seen; but she had recently been undergoing a mental struggle that taxed all her practical common sense. She found now that she saw things more clearly.
Mlle. Fouchette felt that she was happy, therefore she was frightened.
She experienced a mysterious glow of gladness—the gladness of mere living—in her veins. It permeated her being and filled her heart with warm desires.
This feeling had been stealing upon her so gradually and insidiously that she had never realized it until this moment,—the moment when it had taken full possession of her soul.
"I love him! I love him!" she repeated to herself. "I have struggled against it,—I have denied it. I did not want to do it,—it is misery! But I can't help it,—I love him! I, Fouchette, the spy, who would have betrayed him, who wronged him, who thought love impossible!"
She did not try to deceive herself. She knew that at this moment, when her heart was so full of him, he was thinking of another woman,—a beautiful and pure being that was worthy of his love,—that he had forgotten her very existence. She had not the remotest idea of trying to attract that love to herself. She did not even indulge in the pardonable girlish dreams in which "If" is the principal character.
He was as impossible to her as the pyramids of Egypt. Therefore she was frightened.
"Mon Dieu! but I surely do love him!" She communed with her poor little bursting heart. "And it is beautiful to love!" She sighed deeply.