“Hush!” said Madeleine; “if you make such a noise the general will come.”

“It is not right,” she said.  “What folly!”

The tears in her voice were the payment of what must be called a usurious speculation of love.

“I had forgotten to return this key,” I said smiling.

“Then you will never return,” she said.

“Can we ever be really parted?” I asked, with a look which made her drop her eyelids for all answer.

I left her after a few moments passed in that happy stupor of the spirit where exaltation ends and ecstasy begins.  I went with lagging step, looking back at every minute.  When, from the summit of the hill, I saw the valley for the last time I was struck with the contrast it presented to what it was when I first came there.  Then it was verdant, then it glowed, glowed and blossomed like my hopes and my desires.  Initiated now into the gloomy secrets of a family, sharing the anguish of a Christian Niobe, sad with her sadness, my soul darkened, I saw the valley in the tone of my own thoughts.  The fields were bare, the leaves of the poplars falling, the few that remained were rusty, the vine-stalks were burned, the tops of the trees were tan-colored, like the robes in which royalty once clothed itself as if to hide the purple of its power beneath the brown of grief.  Still in harmony with my thoughts, the valley, where the yellow rays of the setting sun were coldly dying, seemed to me a living image of my heart.

To leave a beloved woman is terrible or natural, according as the mind takes it.  For my part, I found myself suddenly in a strange land of which I knew not the language.  I was unable to lay hold of things to which my soul no longer felt attachment.  Then it was that the height and the breadth of my love came before me; my Henriette rose in all her majesty in this desert where I existed only through thoughts of her.  That form so worshipped made me vow to keep myself spotless before my soul’s divinity, to wear ideally the white robe of the Levite, like Petrarch, who never entered Laura’s presence unless clothed in white.  With what impatience I awaited the first night of my return to my father’s roof, when I could read the letter which I felt of during the journey as a miser fingers the bank-bills he carries about him.  During the night I kissed the paper on which my Henriette had manifested her will; I sought to gather the mysterious emanations of her hand, to recover the intonations of her voice in the hush of my being.  Since then I have never read her letters except as I read that first letter; in bed, amid total silence.  I cannot understand how the letters of our beloved can be read in any other way; yet there are men, unworthy to be loved, who read such letters in the turmoil of the day, laying them aside and taking them up again with odious composure.

Here, Natalie, is the voice which echoed through the silence of that night.  Behold the noble figure which stood before me and pointed to the right path among the cross-ways at which I stood.