Their inability to speak, increased their emotion, and they looked about them, but at last he made an effort and asked her name.

“Henriette,” she said.

“Why!  My name is Henri,” he replied.  The sound of their voices had calmed them, and they looked at the banks.  The other skiff had passed them, and seemed to be waiting for them, and the rower called out: 

“We will meet you in the wood; we are going as far as Robinson’s[13] because Madame Dufour is thirsty.”  Then he bent over his oars again, and rowed off so quickly that he was soon out of sight.

[Footnote 13:  A well-known restaurant on the banks of the Seine, which is much frequented by the middle classes.—­TRANSLATOR.]

Meanwhile, a continual roar, which they had heard for some time, came nearer, and the river itself seemed to shiver, as if the dull noise were rising from its depths.

“What is that noise?” she asked.  It was the noise of the weir, which cut the river in two, at the island, and he was explaining it to her, when above the noise of the waterfall, they heard the song of a bird, which seemed a long way off.

“Listen!” he said; “the nightingales are singing during the day, so the females must be sitting.”

A nightingale!  She had never heard one before, and the idea of listening to one roused visions of poetic tenderness in her heart.  A nightingale!  That is to say, the invisible witness of her lovers’ interview which Juliette invoked on her balcony[14]; the celestial music, which is attuned to human kisses, that eternal inspirer of all those languorous romances which open an ideal sky to all the poor little tender hearts of sensitive girls!

[Footnote 14:  Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene V.]

She was going to hear a nightingale.

“We must not make a noise,” her companion said, “and then we can go into the wood, and sit down close to it.”

The skiff seemed to glide.  They saw the trees on the island, whose banks were so low, that they could look into the depths of the thickets.  They stopped, he made the boat fast, Henriette took hold of Henri’s arm, and they went beneath the trees.

“Stop,” he said, so she bent down, and they went into an inextricable thicket of creepers, leaves, and reed-grass, which formed an inpenetrable asylum, and which the young man laughingly called, “his private room.”

Just above their heads, perched in one of the trees which hid them, the bird was still singing.  He uttered shakes and roulades, and then long, vibrating sounds that filled the air, and seemed to lose themselves on the horizon, across the level country, through that burning silence which weighed upon the whole country round.  They did not speak for fear of frightening it away.  They were sitting close together, and slowly Henri’s arm stole round the girl’s waist and squeezed it gently.  She took that daring hand without any anger, and kept removing it whenever he put it round her; without, however, feeling at all embarrassed by this caress, just as if it had been something quite natural, which she was resisting just as naturally.