circular enclosure recently
constructed. I had not written to the countess of my coming, wishing to
surprise her. For this I found myself doubly in fault: first, she was
overwhelmed with the excitement of a pleasure long desired, but
supposed to be impossible; and secondly, she proved to me that all such
deliberate surprises are in bad taste.

When Henriette saw a young man in him who had hitherto seemed but a
child to her, she lowered her eyes with a sort of tragic slowness.
She allowed me to take and kiss her hand without betraying her inward
pleasure, which I nevertheless felt in her sensitive shiver. When she
raised her face to look at me again, I saw that she was pale.

"Well, you don't forget your old friends?" said Monsieur de Mortsauf,
who had neither changed nor aged.

The children sprang upon me. I saw them behind the grave face of the
Abbe Dominis, Jacques' tutor.

"No," I replied, "and in future I am to have six months' leave, which
will always be spent here--Why, what is the matter?" I said to the
countess, putting my arm round her waist and holding her up in presence
of them all.

"Oh, don't!" she said, springing away from me; "it is nothing."

I read her mind, and answered to its secret thought by saying, "Am I not
allowed to be your faithful slave?"

She took my arm, left the count, the children, and the abbe, and led
me to a distance on the lawn, though still within sight of the others;
then, when sure that her voice could not be heard by them, she spoke.

"Felix, my dear friend," she said, "forgive my fears; I have but one
thread by which to guide me in the labyrinth of life, and I dread to see
it broken. Tell me that I am more than ever Henriette to you, that you
will never abandon me, that nothing shall prevail against me, that you
will ever be my devoted friend. I have suddenly had a glimpse into my
future, and you were not there, as hitherto, your eyes shining and fixed
upon me--"

"Henriette! idol whose worship is like that of the Divine,--lily, flower
of my life, how is it that you do not know, you who are my conscience,
that my being is so fused with yours that my soul is here when my body
is in Paris? Must I tell you that I have come in seventeen hours, that
each turn of the wheels gathered thoughts and desires in my breast,
which burst forth like a tempest when I saw you?"

"Yes, tell me! tell me!" she cried; "I am so sure of myself that I can
hear you without wrong. God does not w