“Do you know that it is very wrong to take a young girl thus unawares?” she asked him, smiling.
“Especially when they are busy with their secrets,” replied Maximilien archly.
“Why should I not have my secrets? You certainly have yours.”
“Then you really were thinking of your secrets?” he went on, laughing.
“No, I was thinking of yours. My own, I know.”
“But perhaps my secrets are yours, and yours mine,” cried the young man, softly seizing Mademoiselle de Fontaine’s hand and drawing it through his arm.
After walking a few steps they found themselves under a clump of trees which the hues of the sinking sun wrapped in a haze of red and brown. This touch of natural magic lent a certain solemnity to the moment. The young man’s free and eager action, and, above all, the throbbing of his surging heart, whose hurried beating spoke to Emilie’s arm, stirred her to an emotion that was all the more disturbing because it was produced by the simplest and most innocent circumstances. The restraint under which the young girls of the upper class live gives incredible force to any explosion of feeling, and to meet an impassioned lover is one of the greatest dangers they can encounter. Never had Emilie and Maximilien allowed their eyes to say so much that they dared never speak. Carried a way by this intoxication, they easily forgot the petty stipulations of pride, and the cold hesitancies of suspicion. At first, indeed, they could only express themselves by a pressure of hands which interpreted their happy thoughts.
After slowing pacing a few steps in long silence, Mademoiselle de Fontaine spoke. “Monsieur, I have a question to ask you,” she said trembling, and in an agitated voice. “But, remember, I beg, that it is in a manner compulsory on me, from the rather singular position I am in with regard to my family.”
A pause, terrible to Emilie, followed these sentences, which she had almost stammered out. During the minute while it lasted, the girl, haughty as she was, dared not meet the flashing eye of the man she loved, for she was secretly conscious of the meanness of the next words she added: “Are you of noble birth?”
As soon as the words were spoken she wished herself at the bottom of a lake.