r.

But he did not even see her. Only Clotilde existed for him. And he was
as if transfigured, stirred up by so great a passion that his handsome
face, crowned by his white hair, framed by his white beard, flamed with
youthful passion, with an immense tenderness that had been wounded and
exasperated.

"You, you!" he repeated in a trembling voice.

"Yes, I! Why then, master, should I not love you better than you love
me? And why, if I believe you to be in peril, should I not try to save
you? You are greatly concerned about what I think; you would like well
to make me think as you do!"

She had never before defied him in this way.

"But you are a little girl; you know nothing!"

"No, I am a soul, and you know no more about souls than I do!"

He released her arm, and waved his hand vaguely toward heaven, and
then a great silence fell--a silence full of grave meaning, of the
uselessness of the discussion which he did not wish to enter upon.
Thrusting her aside rudely, he crossed over to the middle window and
opened the blinds, for the sun was declining, and the room was growing
dark. Then he returned.

But she, feeling a need of air and space, went to the open window. The
burning rain of sparks had ceased, and there fell now, from on high,
only the last shiver of the overheated and paling sky; and from the
still burning earth ascended warm odors, with the freer respiration of
evening. At the foot of the terrace was the railroad, with the outlying
dependencies of the station, of which the buildings were to be seen in
the distance; then, crossing the vast arid plain, a line of trees marked
the course of the Viorne, beyond which rose the hills of Sainte-Marthe,
red fields planted with olive trees, supported on terraces by walls of
uncemented stones and crowned by somber pine woods--broad amphitheaters,
bare and desolate, corroded by the heats of summer, of the color of old
baked brick, which this fringe of dark verdure, standing out against the
background of the sky, bordered above. To the left opened the gorges of
the Seille, great yellow stones that had broken away from the soil, and
lay in the midst of blood-colored fields, dominated by an immense band
of rocks like the wall of a gigantic fortress; while to the right, at
the very entrance to the valley through which flowed the Viorne, rose,
one above another, the discolored pink-tiled roofs of the town of
Plassans, the compact and confused mass of an old town, pier