Such neutral pleasures help to soothe a nature irritated by long contemplation of the person beloved.  They were to me, I dare not say to her, like those fissures in a dam through which the water finds a vent and avoids disaster.  Abstinence brings deadly exhaustion, which a few crumbs falling from heaven like manna in the desert, suffices to relieve.  Sometimes I found my Henriette standing before these bouquets with pendant arms, lost in agitated reverie, thoughts swelling her bosom, illumining her brow as they surged in waves and sank again, leaving lassitude and languor behind them.  Never again have I made a bouquet for any one.  When she and I had created this language and formed it to our uses, a satisfaction filled our souls like that of a slave who escapes his masters.

During the rest of this month as I came from the meadows through the gardens I often saw her face at the window, and when I reached the salon she was ready at her embroidery frame.  If I did not arrive at the hour expected (though never appointed), I saw a white form wandering on the terrace, and when I joined her she would say, “I came to meet you; I must show a few attentions to my youngest child.”

The miserable games of backgammon had come to end.  The count’s late purchases took all his time in going hither and thither about the property, surveying, examining, and marking the boundaries of his new possessions.  He had orders to give, rural works to overlook which needed a master’s eye,—­all of them planned and decided on by his wife and himself.  We often went to meet him, the countess and I, with the children, who amused themselves on the way by running after insects, stag-beetles, darning-needles, they too making their bouquets, or to speak more truly, their bundles of flowers.  To walk beside the woman we love, to take her on our arm, to guide her steps,—­these are illimitable joys that suffice a lifetime.  Confidence is then complete.  We went alone, we returned with the “general,” a title given to the count when he was good-humored.  These two ways of taking the same path gave light and shade to our pleasure, a secret known only to hearts debarred from union.  Our talk, so free as we went, had hidden significations as we returned, when either of us gave an answer to some furtive interrogation, or continued a subject, already begun, in the enigmatic phrases to which our language lends itself, and which women are so ingenious in composing.  Who has not known the pleasure of such secret understandings in a sphere apart from those about us, a sphere where spirits meet outside of social laws?

One day a wild hope, quickly dispelled, took possession of me, when the count, wishing to know what we were talking of, put the inquiry, and Henriette answered in words that allowed another meaning, which satisfied him.  This amused Madeleine, who laughed; after a moment her mother blushed and gave me a forbidding look, as if to say she might still withdraw from me her soul as she had once withdrawn her hand.  But our purely spiritual union had far too many charms, and on the morrow it continued as before.