As nothing came to distract them from each other, they stayed together not only this day but all days; for they belonged to one another from the first hour, passing the sceptre from one to the other and playing with themselves as children play with life.  Sitting, happy and content, upon the golden sands, they told each other their past, painful for him, but rich in dreams; dreamy for her, but full of painful pleasure.

“I never had a mother,” said Gabrielle, “but my father has been good as God himself.”

“I never had a father,” said the hated son, “but my mother was all of heaven to me.”

Etienne related his youth, his love for his mother, his taste for flowers.  Gabrielle exclaimed at his last words.  Questioned why, she blushed and avoided answering; then when a shadow passed across that brow which death seemed to graze with its pinion, across that visible soul where the young man’s slightest emotions showed, she answered:—­

“Because I too love flowers.”

To believe ourselves linked far back in the past by community of tastes, is not that a declaration of love such as virgins know how to give?  Love desires to seem old; it is a coquetry of youth.

Etienne brought flowers on the morrow, ordering his people to find rare ones, as his mother had done in earlier days for him.  Who knows the depths to which the roots of a feeling reach in the soul of a solitary being thus returning to the traditions of mother-love in order to bestow upon a woman the same caressing devotion with which his mother had charmed his life?  To him, what grandeur in these nothings wherein were blended his only two affections.  Flowers and music thus became the language of their love.  Gabrielle replied to Etienne’s gifts by nosegays of her own,—­nosegays which told the wise old doctor that his ignorant daughter already knew enough.  The material ignorance of these two lovers was like a dark background on which the faintest lines of their all-spiritual intercourse were traced with exquisite delicacy, like the red, pure outlines of Etruscan figures.  Their slightest words brought a flood of ideas, because each was the fruit of their long meditations.  Incapable of boldly looking forward, each beginning seemed to them an end.  Though absolutely free, they were imprisoned in their own simplicity, which would have been disheartening had either given a meaning to their confused desires.  They were poets and poem both.  Music, the most sensual of arts for loving souls, was the interpreter of their ideas; they took delight in repeating the same harmony, letting their passion flow through those fine sheets of sound in which their souls could vibrate without obstacle.