“Sweet human flower, wooed by my thought, kissed by my soul, oh my lily!” I cried, “untouched, untouchable upon thy stem, white, proud, fragrant, and solitary—­”

“Enough, enough,” she said, smiling.  “Speak to me of yourself; tell me everything.”

Then, beneath the swaying arch of quivering leaves, we had a long conversation, filled with interminable parentheses, subjects taken, dropped, and retaken, in which I told her my life and my occupations; I even described my apartment in Paris, for she wished to know everything; and (happiness then unappreciated) I had nothing to conceal.  Knowing thus my soul and all the details of a daily life full of incessant toil, learning the full extent of my functions, which to any one not sternly upright offered opportunities for deception and dishonest gains, but which I had exercised with such rigid honor that the king, I told her, called me Mademoiselle de Vandenesse, she seized my hand and kissed it, and dropped a tear, a tear of joy, upon it.

This sudden transposition of our roles, this homage, coupled with the thought—­swiftly expressed but as swiftly comprehended—­“Here is the master I have sought, here is my dream embodied!” all that there was of avowal in the action, grand in its humility, where love betrayed itself in a region forbidden to the senses,—­this whirlwind of celestial things fell on my heart and crushed it.  I felt myself too small; I wished to die at her feet.

“Ah!” I said, “you surpass us in all things.  Can you doubt me?—­for you did doubt me just now, Henriette.”

“Not now,” she answered, looking at me with ineffable tenderness, which, for a moment, veiled the light of her eyes.  “But seeing you so changed, so handsome, I said to myself, ’Our plans for Madeleine will be defeated by some woman who will guess the treasures in his heart; she will steal our Felix, and destroy all happiness here.’”

“Always Madeleine!” I replied.  “Is it Madeleine to whom I am faithful?”

We fell into a silence which Monsieur de Mortsauf inconveniently interrupted.  I was forced to keep up a conversation bristling with difficulties, in which my honest replies as to the king’s policy jarred with the count’s ideas, and he forced me to explain again and again the king’s intentions.  In spite of all my questions as to his horses, his agricultural affairs, whether he was satisfied with his five farms, whether he meant to cut the timber of the old avenue, he returned to the subject of politics with the pestering faculty of an old maid and the persistency of a child.  Minds like his prefer to dash themselves against the light; they return again and again and hum about it without ever getting into it, like those big flies which weary our ears as they buzz upon the glass.