"Come," I said, "let us go down to the Pavilion. I want a breath of country air. Paris is smothering me. Shall we start?"
He went to the library to fetch his violin, and we left the house.
We took the train. It was a glorious September day; they were carting the corn at Evry; and the country, warm and mellow from the long, hot summer, was covered by the faintest haze, a gauze of heat that paled the horizon, making a diaphanous film from which the sky rose in a dome of perfect blue.
The little gardens by the way were filled with autumn flowers—stocks and hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies—simple and old-fashioned flowers, great bouquets with which God fills the hands of the poor, more beautiful than all the treasures of Parma and Bordighera.
A child of six, a son of one of the railway porters, bound also for Etiolles on a message, tramped with us. Franzius carried him on his shoulder part of the way, and bought him sweets at the village shop.
Eloise was not at the Pavilion. Madame Ancelot said she had taken her sewing and was in the sun-garden of the Château, and there we sought for her. This garden, small and protected from the east wind by a palisaded screen, was the prettiest place imaginable. It was at the back of the Château, and steps from it led up to the rose-garden. It had in its centre a square marble pond from which a Triton blew thin jets of water for ever at the sky.
Eloise was seated on a small grassy bank; her workbasket was beside her; and she was engaged in some needlework which she held in her lap.
She made a pretty picture against the hollyhocks which lined the bank; and prettier still she looked when, hearing our footsteps, she cast her work aside and ran to meet us.
With a swift glance at Franzius, she ran straight to me and took both my hands in hers.
"He has told you?" said she, looking up full and straight into my face, full and straight with perfect candour and firm eyes more liquid and beautiful than the blue of heaven washed by the early dawn.