hat 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
female birds 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 love trysts which Juliet
invoked on her balcony; that celestial music which it 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!

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 beside it."

The boat seemed to glide. They saw the trees on the island, the banks of
which 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.

"Stoop," he said, so she stooped down, and they went into an inextricable
thicket of creepers, leaves and reed grass, which formed an
undiscoverable retreat, 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 trills and roulades, and then loud,
vibrating notes 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 landscape. 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
that daring hand without any anger, and kept removing it whenever he put
it round her; without, however, feeling at all embarrassed by this
caress, just as if it had been something quite natural, which she was
resisting just as naturally.

She was listening to the bird in ecstasy. She felt an infinite longing
for happiness, for some sudden demonstration of tenderness, for the
revelation of superhuman poetry, and she felt such a softening at her
heart, and relaxation of her nerves, that she began to cry, without
knowing why. The young man was now straining he