ival, was to them a confirmation of the truth they before suspected;
but his prompt return, his new tastes, which kept him at Reuilly during
the summer, seemed to them favorable symptoms.

He was singularly sad, pensive, and more inactive than usual in his
habits. He took long walks alone. Sometimes he took his son with him, as
if by chance. He sometimes attempted a little timid tenderness with his
wife; and this awkwardness, on his part, was quite touching.

"Marie," he said to her one day, "you, who are a fairy, wave your wand
over Reuilly and make of it an island in mid-ocean."

"You say that because you know how to swim," said she, laughing and
shaking her head; but the heart of the young woman was joyful.

"You embrace me now every moment, my little one," said Madame de Tecle to
her. "Is this really all intended for me?"

"My adorable mother," while embracing her again, "I assure you he is
really courting me again. Why, I am ignorant; but he is courting me and
you also, my mother. Observe it!"

Madame de Tecle did observe it. In his conversation with her, M. de
Camors sought, under every pretext, to recall the souvenirs of the past,
common to them both. It seemed he wished to link the past with his new
life; to forget the rest, and pray of them to forget it also.

It was not without fear that these two charming women abandoned
themselves to their hopes. They remembered they were in the presence of
an uncertain person; they little trusted a change so sudden, the reason
of which they could not comprehend. They feared it was some passing
caprice, which would return to them, if they were its dupes, all their
misfortunes, without the dignity which had hitherto attended them.

They were not the only ones struck by this transformation. M. des
Rameures remarked it to them. The neighboring country people felt in the
Count's language something new--as it were, a tender humility; they said
that in other years he had been polite, but this year he was angelic.
Even the inanimate things, the woods, the trees, the heavens, should have
borne the same testimony, for he looked at and studied them with a
benevolent curiosity with which he had never before honored them.

In truth, a profound trouble had invaded him and would not leave him.
More than once, before this epoch, his soul, his philosophy, his pride,
had received a rude shock, but he had no less pursued his path, rising
after every blow, like a lion wounded, but unco