Once, when her hand lay palm upwards on the rim of the vase, he bent down and, without touching it, examined the lines.
“It is exactly as I guessed the first day I saw you—a double destiny, one dark and tragic, the other happy and quite simple. They cross, are entangled and mixed, and it is not yet possible to say which will win in the long run. Which of them is your true destiny, the destiny that corresponds to your true nature?” he said slowly.
“The happy destiny,” she said. “There is in me something that rises quickly to the surface, which brings me, as it does here, cheerfulness and forgetfulness, whatever be the perils.”
“The danger is passing,” Ralph declared, and he continued to study her hand and added: “Distrust [[138]]water. Water may be fatal to you—ship-wrecks—floods—what perils! But they are passing. Yes; things are settling down in your life. Already your happier destiny is prevailing over the unhappy one.”
He lied in order to soothe her, out of the constant desire that a smile should sometimes wreathe her delightful lips, at which he dared hardly look. For his part, indeed, he wished to forget, to be deluded. So he lived for a fortnight in a profound lightness of spirit which he forced himself to hide. He was afflicted by the dizziness of those hours in which love casts you into an intoxication and renders you insensible to everything but the joy of contemplating the beloved and listening to her voice. He refused to call up the threatening image of Marescal, of William, or of Jodot. If none of these three enemies appeared, it was because they had certainly lost track of their victim. Why then should he not abandon himself to the delightful ease which he enjoyed in the presence of the girl? Why should he not, since he loved her and confessed to himself that he loved her, abandon himself to this love which was little by little becoming, almost without his knowing it, the very principle of his life and all his actions?
The awakening was rude. One afternoon, leaning over the wall which ran along the edge of the gorge, they were looking down into the mirror of the pool [[139]]below them, almost still in the middle, its edges ruffled by little waves hurrying towards the narrow outlet through which the brook sank into the earth, when a distant voice called out in the garden below:
“Aurelie! Aurelie! Where are you? Aurelie!”
“Gracious!” cried the girl in troubled accents. “Why are they calling me?”
She ran to the end of the terrace and saw one of the nuns in the avenue of limes.