ghtening the boundaries of his
fields and ditches along the high-road, in his poplar-plantations beside
the Loire, in the winter work of his vineyards, and at Froidfond. All
these things occupied his whole time.

For Eugenie the springtime of love had come. Since the scene at night
when she gave her little treasure to her cousin, her heart had followed
the treasure. Confederates in the same secret, they looked at each
other with a mutual intelligence which sank to the depth of their
consciousness, giving a closer communion, a more intimate relation
to their feelings, and putting them, so to speak, beyond the pale of
ordinary life. Did not their near relationship warrant the gentleness
in their tones, the tenderness in their glances? Eugenie took delight
in lulling her cousin's pain with the pretty childish joys of a new-born
love. Are there no sweet similitudes between the birth of love and the
birth of life? Do we not rock the babe with gentle songs and softest
glances? Do we not tell it marvellous tales of the golden future? Hope
herself, does she not spread her radiant wings above its head? Does it
not shed, with infant fickleness, its tears of sorrow and its tears of
joy? Does it not fret for trifles, cry for the pretty pebbles with which
to build its shifting palaces, for the flowers forgotten as soon as
plucked? Is it not eager to grasp the coming time, to spring forward
into life? Love is our second transformation. Childhood and love
were one and the same thing to Eugenie and to Charles; it was a first
passion, with all its child-like play,--the more caressing to their
hearts because they now were wrapped in sadness. Struggling at birth
against the gloom of mourning, their love was only the more in harmony
with the provincial plainness of that gray and ruined house. As they
exchanged a few words beside the well in the silent court, or lingered
in the garden for the sunset hour, sitting on a mossy seat saying to
each other the infinite nothings of love, or mused in the silent calm
which reigned between the house and the ramparts like that beneath the
arches of a church, Charles comprehended the sanctity of love; for his
great lady, his dear Annette, had taught him only its stormy troubles.
At this moment he left the worldly passion, coquettish, vain, and showy
as it was, and turned to the true, pure love. He loved even the house,
whose customs no longer seemed to him ridiculous. He got up early in the
mornings tha