ts into bouquets
clothed in tender green, and the lines of poplars beside the rivers. She
enjoyed the plenitude of the hours she lived and the astonishment of
profound joys. And it was with the smile of a sleeper suddenly awakened
that, at the station in Paris, in the light of the station, she greeted
her husband, who was glad to see her. When she kissed Madame Marmet, she
told her that she thanked her with all her heart. And truly she was
grateful to all things, like M. Choulette's St. Francis.

In the coupe, which followed the quays in the luminous dust of the
setting sun, she listened without impatience to her husband confiding to
her his successes as an orator, the intentions of his parliamentary
groups, his projects, his hopes, and the necessity to give two or three
political dinners. She closed her eyes in order to think better. She said
to herself: "I shall have a letter to-morrow, and shall see him again
within eight days." When the coupe passed on the bridge, she looked at
the water, which seemed to roll flames; at the smoky arches; at the rows
of trees; at the heads of the chestnut-trees in bloom on the
Cours-la-Reine; all these familiar aspects seemed to be clothed for her
in novel magnificence. It seemed to her that her love had given a new
color to the universe. And she asked herself whether the trees and the
stones recognized her. She was thinking; "How is it that my silence, my
eyes, and heaven and earth do not tell my dear secret?"

M. Martin-Belleme, thinking she was a little tired, advised her to rest.
And at night, closeted in her room, in the silence wherein she heard the
palpitations of her heart, she wrote to the absent one a letter full of
these words, which are similar to flowers in their perpetual novelty: "I
love you. I am waiting for you. I am happy. I feel you are near me. There
is nobody except you and me in the world. I see from my window a blue
star which trembles, and I look at it, thinking that you see it in
Florence. I have put on my table the little red lily spoon. Come! Come!"
And she found thus, fresh in her mind, the eternal sensations and images.

For a week she lived an inward life, feeling within her the soft warmth
which remained of the days passed in the Via Alfieri, breathing the
kisses which she had received, and loving herself for being loved. She
took delicate care and displayed attentive taste in new gowns. It was to
herself, too, that she was pleasing. Madly anxious when