Then we resumed the way to Fonval. My uncle, with all the ardor of a neophyte, bent over the bonnet in order to listen to the pulsations within the metal frame, then he took to pieces one of the oil-valves. All the time he kept questioning me, and I had to inform him of the smallest details of my car, details which he assimilated with an incredible accuracy.
“I say, Nicolas, sound the hooter, will you? Now—go slow—stop—start again—quicker—that will do—put on the brake—back now—stop—it’s colossal!”
He was laughing. His cloudy face seemed almost beautified. Seeing us one would have said we were excellent friends. In fact we were so then perhaps. And I fancied that perhaps, thanks to my “two-seater,” Lerne might one day confide in me.
He preserved this gayety till our return to the château; the proximity of the mysterious workshop did not affect it; it only disappeared in the dining room. Then suddenly Lerne’s brow darkened. Emma had just come in. And the husband of my aunt Lidivine seemed to have effaced himself with my uncle’s smile, only an irritable old savant remaining between his two guests. I then felt how little his future discoveries mattered in comparison with this woman, and that he wanted to acquire glory and wealth only in order to keep the charming girl by his side.
Assuredly he loved her just as I did, and with the same fierce desire.
Barbe came and went as she waited on us more or less anyhow. We were silent. I avoided looking at Emma, being persuaded that my looks would have resembled kisses and that my uncle would have divined them.
She, now quite at her ease, pretended indifference; and with her chin in her hands, her elbows on the table, her bare arms showing out of her short sleeves, she gazed through the windows at the meadows whose inhabitants were lowing.
I should have liked to gaze at the same sight as my bien-aimée; this distant and sentimental communion would have satisfied one; but unluckily the meadows were not visible from where I sat, and my eyes wandered idly about, none the less noting the whiteness of her bare arms and the unwonted heaving of her bodice.
As I was interpreting this unwonted emotion on her part in my favor, Lerne, hostile and taciturn, broke up the party. He ordered Emma off to her room and giving me a book bade me go and read in the shade of the forest.