In the end she overpowered his senses with her kisses, and he promised.
A moment she tasted her triumph in silence, then murmured:
“I have forgotten all my past.”
She led him away from their retreat, in front of the Calvary, round toward the sun. What use was there in any more concealment? They could see now in a great glory, under a clear sky, the radiant diverse forms of the land. There before them, stretching away to the farthest horizon, filling in all the empty space between the black masses of the Granier and the Roche du Guet, were the delicate outlines of the Dauphine Alps—the Sept-Laux, Berlange, and the Grand Charnier—powdered with the first snows and rosy now with the dying light of day. Less distant, and further to the right, the wooded slopes of Corbelet and Lepine, between which the valley of the Echelles was hollowed out, bore like a gold-red fleece the woods and forests that the autumn had set ablaze. Before these chains of mountains was a garland of delicate hills—Charmettes, Montagnole, Saint-Cassin, Vimines, whose soft curves and graceful undulations made one’s eyes love to dwell on them. Floods of light slipped down through their folds, making shafts of dust between their shadows. The sharp spires of the bell towers, the green and gold poplars, served as salient points in the scene. In the plain, Chambéry slumbered. And quite nearby, at the foot of the hill, a vine of dull red and gold threw in its striking note of joyousness.
“Show me Italy,” she bade him.
He made a negligent gesture toward the right, but instead of following the movement of his arm, she turned toward him, and was aghast to find his face so full of anguish. She understood. For herself she could view like a passing tourist these lofty beauties of nature’s mood. Her companion did not feel it thus. Was it not his own land’s supreme attempt to hold him back? Down there he could see La Vigie, and memories of his childhood, of a childhood all clean and pure, rose up from the earth like birds and came to him. Nearer, as he could tell from the vicinity of the castle, was “The House,” that place which each of us calls, just like that, “the house,” as if there were but one in the world.
She followed this last conflict that showed in Maurice’s eyes with a sort of envy, she who had nothing to give up herself. With a sigh she touched him on the shoulder.
“Listen,” she said, “let me go away alone.”
But he was uncomfortable at being detected in the most hidden and instinctive impulses of his soul.
“No, no! You don’t love me, then, any more?”