o end; each
stroke of the oar resounded in our hearts as one step of the day that
brought us nearer to separation. Who knows whether these trembling
leaves may not to-morrow have fallen in the waters? If this moss on
which we still can sit may not to-morrow be covered with a thick mantle
of snow; if this blue sky, these illumined rocks and sparkling waves,
may not, during the mists of this next night, be enveloped and
confounded in one dim and wintry ocean?

A long sigh would escape our lips at thoughts like these; but we never
communicated them to each other, for fear of arousing misfortune by
naming it. Oh, who, in the course of his life, has not felt some joy
without security and without a morrow; when life seems concentrated in
one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel
slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which
counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o'er the
dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance,
or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, and
brings us nearer to the shore where we must descend from the heaven of
our dreams on the bleak and barren strand of harsh reality.

XXXV.

[Illustration: THE LOVERS' COMPACT.]

One sunny evening when our boat lay in a calm and sheltered creek,
formed by the Mont du Chat, and we were delightfully lulled by the
distant sound of a cascade which perpetually murmurs in the grottos
through which it filtrates before losing itself in the abyss of water,
our boatmen landed to draw some nets they had set the day before. We
remained alone in the boat which was moored to the branch of a fig-tree
by a slender rope; the motion of the boat caused the branch to bend and
break without our being aware of it, and we drifted out to the middle
of the bay, nearly three hundred yards from the perpendicular rocks
with which it is surrounded. The waters of the lake in this part were
of that bronzed color and had that molten appearance and look of heavy
immobility which the shade of overhanging cliffs always gives; and the
perpendicular rocks which surrounded it indicated the unfathomable
depth of its waters. I might have taken up the oars and returned to
shore, but we felt a thrill of pleasure at our loneliness and the
absence of any form of living nature. We would have wished to wander
thus on a boundless firmament, instead of on a sea with shores. We no
long