Feeling anew a separation between the silent creature and himself, he took her again by the hand, and gazed into the pupils of her eyes.
"Of what are you thinking?"
"I am thinking of Rimini," answered Hippolyte, with a smile.
Always the past! She remembers bygone days at such a moment! Was it the same sea which lay extended before their eyes, veiled in the same illusion? His first motion was one of hostility against the unconscious evocatrice. Then, as if in a lightning flash, with sudden uneasiness, he saw all the summits of his love light up, and scintillate in the past, prodigiously. Far-distant things came back to his memory, accompanied by waves of music which exalted and transfigured them. He lived again, in one second, the most lyric hours of his passion, and he lived them again in propitious places, among the sumptuous scenery of nature and art which had rendered his joy nobler and more profound. Why then, now, in comparison with that past, had the moment just previous lost part of its charm? In his eyes, dazzled by the rapid gleam of his recollections, everything now seemed colorless. And he perceived that the progressive diminution of the light caused him a kind of indefinable corporeal uneasiness, as if this external phenomenon were in immediate correspondence with some element of his own life.
He sought some phrase that would bring Hippolyte closer to him, to attach her to him by some sensitive tie, to restore to himself of the present reality the exact feeling which he had just lost. But this search was painful to him; the ideas escaped him, dispersed, left him void.
As he had heard a rattle of plates, he asked:
"Are you hungry?"
This question, suggested by a slight material fact, and propounded unexpectedly, with puerile vivacity, made Hippolyte smile.
"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling.
And they turned round to look at the table spread beneath the oak. In a few minutes the dinner would be ready.