"Why, it was you!" she said at last, pointing to my room with a charming gesture.
"Why, it was you!" I exclaimed in my turn, eagerly glancing at a little brass lamp which I had observed on a table covered with screens, boxes of colors and porcelain palettes.
"You were the little light!"
"You were my evening star!"
And we both began to recite the poem of those two years of our lives, and we found that we told the same story. Louise began my sentences and I finished hers. In disclosing our heart secrets and the mysterious sympathy that had existed between us for two years, we interrupted each other with expressions of astonishment and admiration. We paused time and time again to gaze at each other and press each other's hands, as if to assure ourselves that we were awake and it was not all a dream. And every moment this gay and charming refrain broke in upon our ecstasy:
"So you were the brother and friend of my poverty!"
"So you were the sister and companion of my solitude!"
We finally approached in our recollections, through many windings, our meeting upon the banks of the Seine, under the shades of Richeport.
"What seems sad to me," she said with touching grace, "is that after having loved me without knowing me, you should have left me as soon as you did know me. You only worshipped your idle fancies, and, had I loved you then," she continued, "I should have been forced to be jealous of this little lamp."
I told her what inexorable necessity compelled me to leave Richeport and her. Louise listened with a pensive and charming air; but when I came to speak of Edgar's love, she burst out laughing and began to relate, in the gayest manner, some story or other about Turks, which I failed to understand.