begged her to tell me her thoughts.

"Have I any?" she replied in a dazed way.

She drew me into her chamber, made me sit upon the sofa, took a package
from the drawer of her dressing-table, and knelt before me, saying:
"This hair has fallen from my head during the last year; take it, it is
yours; you will some day know how and why."

Slowly I bent to meet her brow, and she did not avoid my lips. I kissed
her sacredly, without unworthy passion, without one impure impulse, but
solemnly, with tenderness. Was she willing to make the sacrifice; or did
she merely come, as I did once, to the verge of the precipice? If love
were leading her to give herself could she have worn that calm, that
holy look; would she have asked, in that pure voice of hers, "You are
not angry with me, are you?"

I left that evening; she wished to accompany me on the road to Frapesle;
and we stopped under my walnut-tree. I showed it to her, and told her
how I had first seen her four years earlier from that spot. "The valley
was so beautiful then!" I cried.

"And now?" she said quickly.

"You are beneath my tree, and the valley is ours!"

She bowed her head and that was our farewell; she got into her carriage
with Madeleine, and I into mine alone.

On my return to Paris I was absorbed in pressing business which took
all my time and kept me out of society, which for a while forgot me.
I corresponded with Madame de Mortsauf, and sent her my journal once a
week. She answered twice a month. It was a life of solitude yet teeming,
like those sequestered spots, blooming unknown, which I had sometimes
found in the depths of woods when gathering the flowers for my poems.

Oh, you who love! take these obligations on you; accept these daily
duties, like those the Church imposes upon Christians. The rigorous
observances of the Roman faith contain a great idea; they plough the
furrow of duty in the soul by the daily repetition of acts which keep
alive the sense of hope and fear. Sentiments flow clearer in furrowed
channels which purify their stream; they refresh the heart, they
fertilize the life from the abundant treasures of a hidden faith, the
source divine in which the single thought of a single love is multiplied
indefinitely.

My love, an echo of the Middle Ages and of chivalry, was known, I know
not how; possibly the king and the Duc de Lenoncourt had spoken of it.
From that upper sphere the romantic yet simple story of a young man
piously ador