she evoked in
him the memory of the past! Her laughter, her pretty ways, her motions,
brought back to his lips the savor of former kisses given and returned;
she made of the far-off past, of which he had forgotten the precise
sensation, something like a dream in the present; she confused epochs,
dates, the ages of his heart, and rekindling the embers of cooled
emotions, she mingled, without his realizing it, yesterday with
to-morrow, recollection with hope.

He asked himself as he questioned his memory whether the Countess in
her brightest bloom had had that fawn-like, supple grace, that bold,
capricious, irresistible charm, like the grace of a running, leaping
animal. No. She had had a riper bloom but was less untamed. First, a
child of the city, then a woman, never having imbibed the air of the
fields and lived in the grass, she had grown pretty under the shade of
the walls and not in the sunlight of heaven.

When they reentered the castle the Countess began to write letters at
her little low table in the bay-window; Annette went up to her own room,
and the painter went out again to walk slowly, cigar in mouth, hands
clasped behind him, through the winding paths of the park. But he did
not go away so far that he lost sight of the white facade or the pointed
roof of the castle. As soon as it disappeared behind groups of trees or
clusters of shrubbery, a shadow seemed to fall over his heart, as when a
cloud hides the sun; and when it reappeared through the apertures in
the foliage he paused a few seconds to contemplate the two rows of
tall windows. Then he resumed his walk. He felt agitated, but content.
Content with what? With everything.

The air seemed pure to him, life was good that day. His body felt once
more the liveliness of a small boy, a desire to run, to catch the yellow
butterflies fluttering over the lawn, as if they were suspended at the
end of elastic threads. He sang little airs from the opera. Several
times he repeated the celebrated phrase by Gounod: "_Laisse-moi
contempler ton visage_," discovering in it a profoundly tender
expression which never before he had felt in the same way.

Suddenly he asked himself how it was that he had so soon become
different from his usual self. Yesterday, in Paris, dissatisfied
with everything, disgusted, irritated; to-day calm, satisfied with
everything--one would say that some benevolent god had changed his soul.
"That same kind god," he thought, "might well have