the marchioness, and which she had lately exchanged with me for that famous picture of Rembrandt which I obtained in so singular a way, and which now hangs in her drawing-room in London.  I took the road I had traversed on foot six years earlier and stopped beneath my walnut-tree.  From there I saw Madame de Mortsauf in a white dress standing at the edge of the terrace.  Instantly I rode towards her with the speed of lightning, in a straight line and across country.  She heard the stride of the swallow of the desert and when I pulled him up suddenly at the terrace, she said to me:  “Oh, you here!”

Those three words blasted me.  She knew my treachery.  Who had told her? her mother, whose hateful letter she afterwards showed me.  The feeble, indifferent voice, once so full of life, the dull pallor of its tones revealed a settled grief, exhaling the breath of flowers cut and left to wither.  The tempest of infidelity, like those freshets of the Loire which bury the meadows for all time in sand, had torn its way through her soul, leaving a desert where once the verdure clothed the fields.  I led my horse through the little gate; he lay down on the grass at my command and the countess, who came forward slowly, exclaimed, “What a fine animal!” She stood with folded arms lest I should try to take her hand; I guessed her meaning.

“I will let Monsieur de Mortsauf know you are here,” she said, leaving me.

I stood still, confounded, letting her go, watching her, always noble, slow, and proud,—­whiter than I had ever seen her; on her brow the yellow imprint of bitterest melancholy, her head bent like a lily heavy with rain.

“Henriette!” I cried in the agony of a man about to die.

She did not turn or pause; she disdained to say that she withdrew from me that name, but she did not answer to it and continued on.  I may feel paltry and small in this dreadful vale of life where myriads of human beings now dust make the surface of the globe, small indeed among that crowd, hurrying beneath the luminous spaces which light them; but what sense of humiliation could equal that with which I watched her calm white figure inflexibly mounting with even steps the terraces of her chateau of Clochegourde, the pride and the torture of that Christian Dido?  I cursed Arabella in a single imprecation which might have killed her had she heard it, she who had left all for me as some leave all for God.  I remained lost in a world of thought, conscious of utter misery on all sides.  Presently I saw the whole family coming down; Jacques, running with the eagerness of his age.  Madeleine, a gazelle with mournful eyes, walked with her mother.  Monsieur de Mortsauf came to me with open arms, pressed me to him and kissed me on both cheeks crying out, “Felix, I know now that I owed you my life.”

Madame de Mortsauf stood with her back towards me during this little scene, under pretext of showing the horse to Madeleine.