In the six days he was all the things to her that she had ever dreamed of. He was her little boy who needed her. He had wild gay moments, when his gaiety swept her along, and moments that needed her comforting.
Then it was their last day together, a softly raining day.
In the morning they went for a long tramp through their own woods and on into the forest, deeper and deeper. All the forest ways were full of wet blue hyacinths and songs of thrushes. The little rain made music in the April branches, and the wet smells were as incense in the forest aisles. When they came home he was hungry. Nothing would do but that they should go down to the village to the Place de l'Eglise and get spice bread and barley sugar from old Madame Champenot, as he had used to do when he was a small boy to whom his mother gave five sous for being good.
They must go down the terrace steps and along the avenue to the Queen's Bosquet, where the old statues stood together dressed in ivy, and through the little stern gate in the rampart walls, and across the moat by the new bridge, that was so old, to the Place of the church.
Thatched roofs and tiled roofs were touched with spring wherever moss and lichen clung to them, green and grey and yellow.
He had gone into the little shop, and she had waited outside, not able to talk to any one.
The great Watch Tower of the castle, and the low square grey tower of the church, and all the crooked old tall black chimney-pots seemed to swim in the blue of the sky.
Waiting there she felt that the coming of spring was sad almost past bearing. She thought, soon the frogs in the castle moats would be singing their lonesome song.
Afterwards they went round to the stables, from which all the horses were gone, and he was sad to think how long he had forgotten his little old pony, scarcely bigger than a dog.
In the afternoon he must go everywhere about the house, to all the old rooms and corridors and stairways, that he never before had known he loved. She must go with him, through the great dim attics, and up the tower stairs, and out on to the battlements, to the sunset; down into the great stone-vaulted kitchens, and the cellars that had been dungeons. They went laughingly at first. But afterwards they did not laugh any more. It had come to have the sacredness of a pilgrimage, their small journeying.