Clochegourde; for she saw the hysterical tendencies of the count’s nature, and feared the outbreaks which might be talked of in that gossipping and jealous neighborhood to the injury of her children.  Thus, thanks to her, no one suspected Monsieur de Mortsauf’s real incapacity, for she wrapped his ruins in a mantle of ivy.  The fickle, not merely discontented but embittered nature of the man found rest and ease in his wife; his secret anguish was lessened by the balm she shed upon it.

This brief history is in part a summary of that forced from Monsieur de Chessel by his inward vexation.  His knowledge of the world enabled him to penetrate several of the mysteries of Clochegourde.  But the prescience of love could not be misled by the sublime attitude with which Madame de Mortsauf deceived the world.  When alone in my little bedroom, a sense of the full truth made me spring from my bed; I could not bear to stay at Frapesle when I saw the lighted windows of Clochegourde.  I dressed, went softly down, and left the chateau by the door of a tower at the foot of a winding stairway.  The coolness of the night calmed me.  I crossed the Indre by the bridge at the Red Mill, took the ever-blessed punt, and rowed in front of Clochegourde, where a brilliant light was streaming from a window looking towards Azay.

Again I plunged into my old meditations; but they were now peaceful, intermingled with the love-note of the nightingale and the solitary cry of the sedge-warbler.  Ideas glided like fairies through my mind, lifting the black veil which had hidden till then the glorious future.  Soul and senses were alike charmed.  With what passion my thoughts rose to her!  Again and again I cried, with the repetition of a madman, “Will she be mine?” During the preceding days the universe had enlarged to me, but now in a single night I found its centre.  On her my will and my ambition henceforth fastened; I desired to be all in all to her, that I might heal and fill her lacerated heart.

Beautiful was that night beneath her windows, amid the murmur of waters rippling through the sluices, broken only by a voice that told the hours from the clock-tower of Sache.  During those hours of darkness bathed in light, when this sidereal flower illumined my existence, I betrothed to her my soul with the faith of the poor Castilian knight whom we laugh at in the pages of Cervantes,—­a faith, nevertheless, with which all love begins.

At the first gleam of day, the first note of the waking birds, I fled back among the trees of Frapesle and reached the house; no one had seen me, no one suspected by absence, and I slept soundly until the bell rang for breakfast.  When the meal was over I went down, in spite of the heat, to the meadow-lands for another sight of the Indre and its isles, the valley and its slopes, of which I seemed so passionate an admirer.  But once there, thanks to a swiftness of foot like that of a loose horse, I returned to my punt, the