features were quite familiar to him.

These conversations, as a rule, covered only the years during which they
had been acquainted with each other. He recalled to her recollection
insignificant details--the colour of her dress at a certain period, a
woman whom they had met on a certain day, what she had said on another
occasion; and she replied, quite astonished:

"Yes, I remember!"

Their tastes, their judgments, were the same. Often one of them, when
listening to the other, exclaimed:

"That's the way with me."

And the other replied:

"And with me, too!"

Then there were endless complaints about Providence:

"Why was it not the will of Heaven? If we had only met----!"

"Ah! if I had been younger!" she sighed.

"No, but if I had been a little older."

And they pictured to themselves a life entirely given up to love,
sufficiently rich to fill up the vastest solitudes, surpassing all other
joys, defying all forms of wretchedness, in which the hours would glide
away in a continual outpouring of their own emotions, and which would be
as bright and glorious as the palpitating splendour of the stars.

They were nearly always standing at the top of the stairs exposed to the
free air of heaven. The tops of trees yellowed by the autumn raised
their crests in front of them at unequal heights up to the edge of the
pale sky; or else they walked on to the end of the avenue into a
summer-house whose only furniture was a couch of grey canvas. Black
specks stained the glass; the walls exhaled a mouldy smell; and they
remained there chatting freely about all sorts of topics--anything that
happened to arise--in a spirit of hilarity. Sometimes the rays of the
sun, passing through the Venetian blind, extended from the ceiling down
to the flagstones like the strings of a lyre. Particles of dust whirled
amid these luminous bars. She amused herself by dividing them with her
hand. Frederick gently caught hold of her; and he gazed on the twinings
of her veins, the grain of her skin, and the form of her fingers. Each
of those fingers of hers was for him more than a thing--almost a
person.

She gave him her gloves, and, the week after, her handkerchief. She
called him "Frederick;" he called her "Marie," adoring this name, which,
as he said, was expressly made to be uttered with a sigh of ecstasy, and
which seemed to contain clouds of incense and scattered heaps of roses.

They soon came to an understanding as to the days on wh