of the world enabled
him to penetrate several of the mysteries of Clochegourde. But the
prescience of love could not be misled by the sublime attitude with
which Madame de Mortsauf deceived the world. When alone in my little
bedroom, a sense of the full truth made me spring from my bed; I
could not bear to stay at Frapesle when I saw the lighted windows of
Clochegourde. I dressed, went softly down, and left the chateau by the
door of a tower at the foot of a winding stairway. The coolness of the
night calmed me. I crossed the Indre by the bridge at the Red Mill,
took the ever-blessed punt, and rowed in front of Clochegourde, where a
brilliant light was streaming from a window looking towards Azay.

Again I plunged into my old meditations; but they were now peaceful,
intermingled with the love-note of the nightingale and the solitary cry
of the sedge-warbler. Ideas glided like fairies through my mind, lifting
the black veil which had hidden till then the glorious future. Soul and
senses were alike charmed. With what passion my thoughts rose to her!
Again and again I cried, with the repetition of a madman, "Will she be
mine?" During the preceding days the universe had enlarged to me, but
now in a single night I found its centre. On her my will and my ambition
henceforth fastened; I desired to be all in all to her, that I might
heal and fill her lacerated heart.

Beautiful was that night beneath her windows, amid the murmur of waters
rippling through the sluices, broken only by a voice that told the hours
from the clock-tower of Sache. During those hours of darkness bathed in
light, when this sidereal flower illumined my existence, I betrothed to
her my soul with the faith of the poor Castilian knight whom we laugh at
in the pages of Cervantes,--a faith, nevertheless, with which all love
begins.

At the first gleam of day, the first note of the waking birds, I fled
back among the trees of Frapesle and reached the house; no one had seen
me, no one suspected by absence, and I slept soundly until the bell rang
for breakfast. When the meal was over I went down, in spite of the heat,
to the meadow-lands for another sight of the Indre and its isles, the
valley and its slopes, of which I seemed so passionate an admirer. But
once there, thanks to a swiftness of foot like that of a loose horse, I
returned to my punt, the willows, and Clochegourde. All was silent and
palpitating, as a landscape is at midday in summer. The still fo