When the evening came, and I was leading my wife away, Mme. Mairieux, at the moment of parting, looked at her daughter in admiration before kissing her, like a commander embracing a newly decorated soldier. The chateau represented in her eyes the Promised Land.
Her husband expressed his emotion differently:
“She is my only child,” he said to me. “Take care of her.”
Fearing lest he might break down, he dared not say more. In the midst of our little group, swayed by such different sentiments, Raymonde preserved her face of peace.
We had only to walk the length of the avenue, and we were at home. After the fir branches which carpeted the space in front of the lodge, we found the ground hard, and it crackled under our feet, for it was freezing. The night was not dark. In the depths of the sky, between the chestnut trees whose branches stood out black and bare, and the oaks with their dry, shrivelled leaves, shone thousands of stars, that almost touched each other, and seemed to be in motion like a swarm of bees. Certainly this sense of throbbing has remained in my memory. Have I since seen similar nights? Did I dream of that one? I do not know now.
The cold was stinging.
“Suppose we run?” I suggested.
“Come,” she answered.
She picked up the train of her wedding dress and darted off. Practice in the woods had made her agile, and I still see clearly before me this flight in the shadow, the bare trees, the lawn and the empty urns. Oh! it was a wonderful night, a holy night, when in the majestic silence I heard her two little shoes striking the ground.
I stopped, and then at last I pursued her. She was the first to gain the arches of the cloister. Without doubt the apparent life in the sky had struck her too, for when I rejoined her, she pointed it out to me with these words: