"Without a hidden thought. She is so young. Look at her and not at the past. Live near her and patiently form her mind. Let your life be altogether upright, without any side issues. That is the secret of happiness."
He bowed and wished to kiss her hand. She gently drew it away. She would not even allow him this humble caress. In the long silence which followed, enwrapping them as the evening mist the sloping meadows, each was indulging in personal reflections. The air was calm; Nature was motionless. Some fruit, falling from the branches, and its hard impact against the ground, made them shudder as a call of time.
She was counting all the lost years of her own happiness, the result of her former daily routine, and was seeking by what enchantment, what witchcraft, to blot them out, to restore to her clear days, no longer troubled and cloudy. He repeated the words she had spoken:
"She will go away."
She was going to Paris with Albert. The reconciliation, which, after a long time, he no longer doubted since the previous day, was then final. In order that he might carry away a more vivid and tender impression of her, he gazed for a long time at the young woman, seated in front of her country home, surrounded by the trees in the orchard, and caressed by the peace of the country. On this autumn evening (despite a little pallor and slimness, which would soon vanish), with her big hood, her charm of youth and the bunch of grasses which Marie Louise had laid on her knees, she symbolized that picture of hope of the blossoming earth in springtime. He contrasted her with another woman whom he had seen in spring, filled with all the melancholy of autumn. It was Anne de Sézery, on the terrace of the Luxembourg Garden, at the end of April. He had accompanied her from the Avenue de l'Observatoire to Cluny in Albert's absence, and how strangely he had taken advantage of that tête-à-tête which he had sought with so much patience and cleverness. From tree to tree along the avenue he put off her confidence. In the garden, as they followed the stone balustrade from which one can overlook the central basin and the palace, he stopped suddenly:
"I must speak to you, Mademoiselle."
She intuitively imagined something serious, something, even more serious than he could say, as her question indicated:
"Has our friend asked you to do so?"
"No, no!"
She was somewhat comforted.