She was not laughing now. A blush covered her cheeks and forehead. She no longer dared look at him; and Guillaume’s eyes almost hurt her. This time, it was the real, perturbing, mysterious revelation of love. Shaken with emotion, she faltered:

“Go away ... please go away....”

He kissed the hem of her skirt, picked some leaves, some blades of grass that Gilberte’s feet had trodden and went away.

VIII
THE APPOITMENT

“Gilberte:

“I must not see you again. When you read these lines, I shall have left Domfront. You are rich and I am poor: you need look for no other explanation of my departure and of my conduct in the past. I loved you from the first; and from the first I swore that I would shun you and for ever conceal the feeling with which you inspire me.

“Do you now understand why I behaved so coldly to you from the beginning, though my heart throbbed at the mere sound of your voice; why I was so hard to my mother, whose plans were obvious to all and drove me to exasperation: I was afraid lest you should think that I was privy to them; why I kept in the background, hiding among those rocks, looking at you from a distance as at a goal which I knew was, and wished it to be, inaccessible?

“But you came to me, Gilberte: that is all my excuse. You came to me out of kindness to my mother, perhaps also prompted by that instinct which makes us conscious of love where it lies deepest. What could I do against your fascination? I did not even struggle. I closed my eyes to all that was not you, you and your beauty and your smile and your charming grace and the colour of your hair and the freshness of your cheeks and the rhythm of your footsteps; and, with not a further thought of my oath or the inevitable consequences of my weakness, I accepted the infinite joy that came to me. Oh, Gilberte, those few weeks!... But there was something which I had never imagined in my boldest dreams: you loved me, you also loved me.

“You love me, which means that happiness is within my reach to-morrow, the next day, every day. It is there, I have but to take it; a word from me and you are my wife. For I know you, my beloved: the gift of your heart is the gift of your entire life.

“And so I must go, if I would not be overcome by temptation....