He tried to remember.
'I think not; I have been in the forest.'
A little quiver ran over her face; she pulled at her needle violently and broke the thread.
'Finished!' she said, throwing down the coat and springing up. 'Don't tell your tailor who did it! I am for perfection in all things—abas l'amateur! Come in, it is supper-time past. I will go and hurry Madame Pyat. Tu dois avoir une faim de loup.'
He shook his head, smiling sadly.
'I tell you, you are hungry, you shall be hungry!' she cried, suddenly flinging her arm round his neck, and nestling her fair head against his shoulder. Her voice was half a sob.
'Oh, so I am!—so I am!' he said, with a wild emphasis, and would have caught her to him. But she slipped away and ran before him to the house, turning at the window with the sweetest, frankest gesture to bid him follow.
They passed the evening close together, she on a stool leaning against his knee, he reading aloud Alfred de Musset's Nuit de Mai. At one moment she was all absorbed in the verse, carried away by it; great battle-cry that it is! calling the artist from the miseries of his own petty fate to the lordship of life and nature as a whole; the next she had snatched the book out of his hands and was correcting his accent, bidding him speak after her, put his lips so. Never had she been so charming. It was the coaxing charm of the softened child that cannot show its penitence enough. Every now and then she fell to pouting because she could not move him to gaiety. But in reality his sad and passive gentleness, the mask of feelings which would otherwise have been altogether beyond his control, served him with her better than any gaiety could have done.
Gaiety! it seemed to him his heart was broken.
At night, after a troubled sleep, he suddenly woke, and sprang up in an agony. Gone! was she gone already? For that was what her sweet ways meant. Ah, he had known it all along!