Yet he had always hoped for certain encouragements which Marguerite refused to give before the failing eyes of her dying mother.  Both equally pure, they had never said to one another a word of love.  Their joys were solitary joys tasted by each alone.  They trembled apart, though together they quivered beneath the rays of the same hope.  They seemed to fear themselves, conscious that each only too surely belonged to the other.  Emmanuel trembled lest he should touch the hand of the sovereign to whom he had made a shrine of his heart; a chance contact would have roused hopes that were too ardent, he could not then have mastered the force of his passion.  And yet, while neither bestowed the vast, though trivial, the innocent and yet all-meaning signs of love that even timid lovers allow themselves, they were so firmly fixed in each other’s hearts that both were ready to make the greatest sacrifices, which were, indeed, the only pleasures their love could expect to taste.

Since Madame Claes’s death this hidden love was shrouded in mourning.  The tints of the sphere in which it lived, dark and dim from the first, were now black; the few lights were veiled by tears.  Marguerite’s reserve changed to coldness; she remembered the promise exacted by her mother.  With more freedom of action, she nevertheless became more distant.  Emmanuel shared his beloved’s grief, comprehending that the slightest word or wish of love at such a time transgressed the laws of the heart.  Their love was therefore more concealed than it had ever been.  These tender souls sounded the same note:  held apart by grief, as formerly by the timidities of youth and by respect for the sufferings of the mother, they clung to the magnificent language of the eyes, the mute eloquence of devoted actions, the constant unison of thoughts,—­divine harmonies of youth, the first steps of a love still in its infancy.  Emmanuel came every morning to inquire for Claes and Marguerite, but he never entered the dining-room, where the family now sat, unless to bring a letter from Gabriel or when Balthazar invited him to come in.  His first glance at the young girl contained a thousand sympathetic thoughts; it told her that he suffered under these conventional restraints, that he never left her, he was always with her, he shared her grief.  He shed the tears of his own pain into the soul of his dear one by a look that was marred by no selfish reservation.  His good heart lived so completely in the present, he clung so firmly to a happiness which he believed to be fugitive, that Marguerite sometimes reproached herself for not generously holding out her hand and saying, “Let us at least be friends.”