On an impulse of compassion and repentance he went out of the house and took the train which goes west on its way to the sea-shores of Brétagne.
'Poor child,' he thought. 'Fear of them makes me a coward to her. She must have deemed me unkind and neglectful; all these weeks and months I have never been near her. Time goes so fast——'
He alighted at the little station of Trappes, and took his way on foot across the fields towards the Croix Blanche.
The weather, though dull and grey, had been rainless as the train passed through the market-gardens and shabby suburbs of the north-west, but when he reached Magny the valley in its silvery fog looked poetic, and wore a charm all its own after the dreary bricks and mortar of the outer-boulevards. The leafless woods wore lovely hues of bronze and ashen-grey; the bare fields were of the red-brown of a stag's hind; far away the plains of La Beauce were veiled in a mist which promised snow; a man went by him carrying cut wood with the bowed back, the bent head, the heavy step, the downcast face which Millet has made immortal in art.
'How have we managed to make a toil and a burden of that outdoor life which was so blessed to the Greeks'?' he mused. 'We must have blundered horribly. Or is it the weather which is more at fault than we? In the south, pastoral life is still enjoyable and still graceful.'
He spoke to the woodman and got only sullen monosyllables in return. He gave him some money, and saw the slow dull eye lit up with surprise and greed.
'I should be as sullen and as covetous myself, I daresay,' he thought, 'if I had to cut faggots for a living.'
Then he went on over the fields along the cross-road which led to the home of Damaris.
He had not yet reached it, when he perceived her at a little distance, walking quickly, with the white dogs running before her. She had on a long dark cloak, and the hood of it, lined with crimson, was drawn over her head; her head was a little thrown backward; her eyes were looking upward at the steel-grey sky, across whose sad-coloured vault a flock of the farm pigeons flew. Her hands held an open book; her lips were moving, but he was too far off from her to hear the sound of her voice. Her feet came quickly over the brown bare pasture so that she almost touched him ere she saw him. When she did so she dropped the book; the colour in her face changed instantly from white to red, from red to white. She gave an inarticulate cry of pleasure and amaze.
'You! you!—at last!' she said, holding out to him both her hands, warm with the warmth of youth, though gloveless, in the winter weather.