he did not imagine that he could be
agreeable to her, or more seductive than many artists and lovers of art
at whom she laughed with her friends. When she saw him, he pleased her;
she had a desire to attract him, to see him often. The night he dined at
her house she realized that she had for him a noble and elevating
affection. But soon after he irritated her a little; it made her
impatient to see him closeted within himself and too little preoccupied
by her. She would have liked to disturb him. She was in that state of
impatience when she met him one evening, in front of the grille of the
Musee des Religions, and he talked to her of Ravenna and of the Empress
seated on a gold chair in her tomb. She had found him serious and
charming, his voice warm, his eyes soft in the shadow of the night, but
too much a stranger, too far from her, too unknown. She had felt a sort
of uneasiness, and she did not know, when she walked along the boxwood
bordering the terrace, whether she desired to see him every day or never
to see him again.

Since then, at Florence, her only pleasure was to feel that he was near
her, to hear him. He made life for her charming, diverse, animated, new.
He revealed to her delicate joys and a delightful sadness; he awakened in
her a voluptuousness which had been always dormant. Now she was
determined never to give him up. But how? She foresaw difficulties; her
lucid mind and her temperament presented them all to her. For a moment
she tried to deceive herself; she reflected that perhaps he, a dreamer,
exalted, lost in his studies of art, might remain assiduous without being
exacting. But she did not wish to reassure herself with that idea. If
Dechartre were not a lover, he lost all his charm. She did not dare to
think of the future. She lived in the present, happy, anxious, and
closing her eyes.

She was dreaming thus, in the shade traversed by arrows of light, when
Pauline brought to her some letters with the morning tea. On an envelope
marked with the monogram of the Rue Royale Club she recognized the
handwriting of Le Menil. She had expected that letter. She was only
astonished that what was sure to come had come, as in her childhood, when
the infallible clock struck the hour of her piano lesson.

In his letter Robert made reasonable reproaches. Why did she go without
saying anything, without leaving a word of farewell? Since his return to
Paris he had expected every morning a letter which had not come