led out:

"We will meet you in the wood; we are going as far as _Robinson's_[13]
because Madame Dufour is thirsty." Then he bent over his oars again, and
rowed off so quickly that he was soon out of sight.

[Footnote 13: A well-known restaurant on the banks of the Seine, which
is much frequented by the middle classes.--TRANSLATOR.]

Meanwhile, a continual roar, which they had heard for some time, came
nearer, and the river itself seemed to shiver, as if the dull noise were
rising from its depths.

"What is that noise?" she asked. It was the noise of the weir, which cut
the river in two, at the island, and he was explaining it to her, when
above the noise of the waterfall, they heard the song of a bird, which
seemed a long way off.

"Listen!" he said; "the nightingales are singing during the day, so the
females must be sitting."

A nightingale! She had never heard one before, and the idea of listening
to one roused visions of poetic tenderness in her heart. A nightingale!
That is to say, the invisible witness of her lovers' interview which
Juliette invoked on her balcony[14]; the celestial music, which is
attuned to human kisses, that eternal inspirer of all those languorous
romances which open an ideal sky to all the poor little tender hearts of
sensitive girls!

[Footnote 14: Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene V.]

She was going to hear a nightingale.

"We must not make a noise," her companion said, "and then we can go into
the wood, and sit down close to it."

The skiff seemed to glide. They saw the trees on the island, whose banks
were so low, that they could look into the depths of the thickets. They
stopped, he made the boat fast, Henriette took hold of Henri's arm, and
they went beneath the trees.

"Stop," he said, so she bent down, and they went into an inextricable
thicket of creepers, leaves, and reed-grass, which formed an
inpenetrable asylum, and which the young man laughingly called, "his
private room."

Just above their heads, perched in one of the trees which hid them, the
bird was still singing. He uttered shakes and roulades, and then long,
vibrating sounds that filled the air, and seemed to lose themselves on
the horizon, across the level country, through that burning silence
which weighed upon the whole country round. They did not speak for fear
of frightening it away. They were sitting close together, and slowly
Henri's arm stole round the girl's waist and squeezed it gently. She
took th