Overcome, trembling with memories, she strove to struggle against so many emotions and braced herself not to succumb to them. But she was no longer strong [[262]]enough. The past weighed her down like a bending branch, and she bent her head, murmuring with a sob:
“Who are you? Who are you?”
She was astounded by this inconceivable miracle. Having never revealed the secret that had been instructed to her; guarding jealously, since her childhood, the treasure of remembrances over which her memory watched so dutifully, which she was not to hand over, according to her mother’s command, to any one but the man she should love, she felt herself wholly feeble before this strange being who read the very depths of her soul.
“Then I haven’t made a mistake? It is really here, is it not?” said Ralph, infinitely touched by the girl’s charming abandon.
“It is really here,” murmured Aurelie. “During the whole drive the things that met my eye seemed to me things I had already seen—the road—the trees—the paved causeway which rose between two embankments—and then this lake, these rocks, the color and the coldness of this water—and above all the sound of these bells! They are the same as long ago—they have come to our ears at the very spot at which they came to my mother, my mother’s father, and the little girl I then was. As to-day we came out of the shadow to enter the other part of the lake under as bright a sun.”
She had raised her eyes and was gazing ahead. In truth, another lake, smaller, but on a more grandiose [[263]]scale, opened before them, ringed by steeper cliffs and of an aspect of a yet more savage and more striking solitude.
One by one the memories awoke in her. She told Ralph of them quietly, as confidences one makes to a friend. She called up before his mind a little girl, happy, care-free, amused by the spectacle of the shapes and colors which she was again contemplating to-day, with her eyes shining with tears.
“It is as if you took me on a journey through your life,” said Ralph, in tones shaken by emotion. “And I take as much pleasure in seeing the scene on that long distant day as you in recalling it.”
She went on: “My mother was sitting where you are, and her father was facing her. I was holding my mother’s hand. Look, that tree all by itself, in that hollow in the cliff, it was there—and also those great red stains on that rock over there—and see how the cliffs narrow just as they did then. But there is no more of the channel—it’s the end of the lake. This other lake stretches in a curve like a half moon. We’re going to come to a quite small beach at the end of it. Look, there it is—with a waterfall on the left springing out of the cliff. There is another to the right of it. You’ll see the sand in a minute; it sparkles like mica. And there is a big grotto—yes, I’m sure of it—and at the entrance of this grotto——”
“At the entrance of this grotto?” [[264]]