oment the happiness which
she had never enjoyed!

Within her soul, however, a great sorrow lingered, a heart-burning and
a consciousness of a gloomy blank. Then argument rose to her lips. Was
she not free? In her love for Henri she deceived nobody; she could
deal as she pleased with her love. Then, did not everything exculpate
her? What had been her life for nearly two years? Her widowhood, her
unrestricted liberty, her loneliness--everything, she realized, had
softened and prepared her for love. Love must have been smouldering
within her during the long evenings spent between her two old friends,
the Abbe and his brother, those simple hearts whose serenity had
lulled it to rest; it had been growing whilst she remained shut up
within those narrow walls, far away from the world, and gazed on Paris
rumbling noisily on the horizon; it had been growing even when she
leaned from that window in the dreamy mood which she had scarce been
conscious of, but which little by little had rendered her so weak. And
a recollection came to her of that radiant spring morning when Paris
had shone out fair and clear, as though in a glass mirror, when it had
worn the pure, sunny hue of childhood, as she lazily surveyed it,
stretched in her easy-chair with a book upon her knees. That morning
love had first awoke--a scarcely perceptible feeling that she had been
unable to define, and against which she had believed herself strongly
armed. To-day she was in the same place, but devoured by overpowering
passion, while before her eyes the dying sun illumined the city with
flame. It seemed to her that one day had sufficed for all, that this
was the ruddy evening following upon that limpid morning; and she
imagined she could feel those fiery beams scorching her heart.

But a change had come over the sky. The sun, in its descent towards
the slopes of Meudon, had just burst through the last clouds in all
its splendor. The azure vault was illuminated with glory; deep on the
horizon the crumbling ridge of chalk clouds, blotting out the distant
suburbs of Charenton and Choisy-le-Roi, now reared rocks of a tender
pink, outlined with brilliant crimson; the flotilla of cloudlets
drifting slowly through the blue above Paris, was decked with purple
sails; while the delicate network, seemingly fashioned of white silk
thread, above Montmartre, was suddenly transformed into golden cord,
whose meshes would snare the stars as soon as they should rise.

Beneath t