f her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the
motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive
confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition
of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express
it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not
say that he had forgotten her.

Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked
balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she
ran across the fields in the morning to her lover's house. The noises
of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if
on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity
dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the
yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her,
and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in
the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her
hair.

"But pardon me!" she said. "It is wrong of me. I weary you with my
eternal complaints."

"No, never, never!"

"If you knew," she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes,
in which a tear was trembling, "all that I had dreamed!"

"And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I
dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the
crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me.
In an engraver's shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one
of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the
moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there
continually; I stayed there hours together." Then in a trembling voice,
"She resembled you a little."

Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the
irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.

"Often," he went on, "I wrote you letters that I tore up."

She did not answer. He continued--

"I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I
recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages
through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours."

She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption.
Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes
on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin
of them with her toes.

At last she sighed