And there at his back he felt that some infamous thing was brewing.  Shouts of laughter cut him to the heart.  What should he do?  He knew well, but he could not do it.

He steadily watched an angler upon the bank opposite him, and his motionless line.

Suddenly, the worthy man jerked a little silver fish, which wriggled at the end of his line, out of the river.  Then he endeavored to extract his hook, hoisted and turned it, but in vain.  At last, losing patience, he commenced to pull it out, and all the bleeding gullet of the beast, with a portion of its intestines, came out.  Paul shuddered, rent himself to his heart-strings.  It seemed to him that the hook was his love and that if he should pluck it out, all that he had in his breast would come out in the same way at the end of a curved iron fixed in the depths of his being, of which Madeleine held the line.

A hand was placed upon his shoulder; he started and turned; his mistress was at his side.  They did not speak to each other; and she rested, like him, with her elbows upon the railing, her eyes fixed upon the river.

He sought for what he ought to say to her and could find nothing.  He did not even arrive at disentangling his own emotions; all that he was sensible of was joy at feeling her there close to him, come back again, and a shameful cowardice, a craving to pardon everything, to permit everything, provided she never left him.

At last, at the end of some minutes, he asked her in a very gentle voice: 

“Do you wish that we should leave?  It will be nicer in the boat.”

She answered:  “Yes, my puss.”

And he assisted her into the skiff, pressing her hands, all softened, with some tears still in his eyes.  Then she looked at him with a smile and they kissed each other anew.

They re-ascended the river very slowly, skirting the bank planted with willows, covered with grass, bathed and still in the afternoon warmth.  When they had returned to the Restaurant Grillon, it was barely six o’clock.  Then leaving their boat they set off on foot on the island towards Bezons, across the fields and along the high poplars which bordered the river.  The long grass ready to be mowed was full of flowers.  The sun, which was sinking, showed himself from beneath a sheet of red light, and in the tempered heat of the closing day the floating exhalations from the grass, mingled with the damp scents from the river, filled the air with a soft languor, with a happy light, as though with a vapor of well-being.

A soft weakness overtakes the heart, and a species of communion with this splendid calm of evening, with this vague and mysterious chilliness of outspread life, with the keen and melancholy poetry which seems to arise from flowers and things, develops itself revealed at this sweet and pensive time to the senses.

He felt all that; but she did not understand anything of it, for her part.  They walked side by side; and, suddenly tired of being silent, she sang.  She sang with her shrill and false voice, something which pervaded the streets, an air catching the memory, which rudely destroyed the profound and serene harmony of the evening.