For four consecutive days he posted himself under cover at the back of the court-yard. When he heard the sound of a footstep nearby, his heart jumped. Always he was disappointed. It caused him keen suffering. But at five o’clock on the fourth day, among the trees and bushes which covered the slope down the court-yard, he heard the rustling of a gown. Among them he saw a gown. He was on the point of darting forward, when he stopped short, overwhelmed by a sudden access of rage. He saw that it was Clarice d’Etigues.
She had in her hand a bunch of flowers exactly like the other one. She crossed the court-yard lightly to the window of his bedroom and putting her hand through it set those flowers on his dressing-table.
When she retraced her steps, he had a clear view of her face and was struck by its paleness. Her cheeks had lost their fresh coloring and her sunken eyes were witness to the bitterness of her grief and her hours of sleeplessness.
“You will make me suffer bitterly,” she had said.
She had not foreseen however, that those sufferings would begin so soon and that the very day which had seen their love at its zenith, would be a day of farewell and of inexplicable desertion.
He remembered the prediction and raging at her for the injury he was doing her, furious at his disappointment, that it had been Clarice who had brought the flowers and not she for whom he was waiting, he suffered her to go away without a word.
However it was to Clarice—to Clarice who thus herself destroyed her last chance of happiness—that he owed the precious information which he needed to find his way in the darkness in which he was moving. An hour later he discovered that a letter was fastened to the bouquet. He tore it open and read:
“Is it already finished, dearest? No: it cannot be. There is no real reason for my tears surely?... It is impossible that you should have already had enough, of your Clarice?
“Darling to-night they are all going away by train; and they will not come back till very late to-morrow. You will come, won’t you? You will not leave me to weep again?”
Poor, mournful lines!... Ralph was not softened by them. He considered this journey of which she told him and remembered that accusation of Beaumagnan: “Learning from me that we were soon about to examine from cellar to roof a mansion near Dieppe, she betook herself there hastily——”