no attraction for me beyond their novelty.  Bodily repose was a burden to me, and the calm that reigned in this house, so full of order and silence, would have been unbearable, had not Edmee’s presence and the tumult of my own desires communicated to it some of my disorder, and peopled it with some of my visions.  Never for a single moment had I desired to become the head of this house, the possessor of this property; and it was with genuine pleasure that I had just heard Edmee do justice to my disinterestedness.  The thought of coupling two ends so entirely distinct as my passion and my interests was still more repugnant to me.  I roamed about the park a prey to a thousand doubts, and then wandered into the open country unconsciously.  It was a glorious night.  The full moon was pouring down floods of soft light upon the ploughed lands, all parched by the heat of the sun.  Thirsty plants were straightening their bowed stems—­each leaf seemed to be drinking in through all its pores all the dewy freshness of the night.  I, too, began to feel a soothing influence at work.  My heart was still beating violently, but regularly.  I was filled with a vague hope; the image of Edmee floated before me on the paths through the meadows, and no longer stirred the wild agonies and frenzied desires which had been devouring me since the night I first beheld her.

I was crossing a spot where the green stretches of pasture were here and there broken by clumps of young trees.  Huge oxen with almost white skins were lying in the short grass, motionless, as if plunged in peaceful thought.  Hills sloped gently up to the horizon, and their velvety contours seemed to ripple in the bright rays of the moon.  For the first time in my life I realized something of the voluptuous beauty and divine effluence of the night.  I felt the magic touch of some unknown bliss.  It seemed that for the first time in my life I was looking on moon and meadows and hills.  I remembered hearing Edmee say that nothing our eyes can behold is more lovely than Nature; and I was astonished that I had never felt this before.  Now and them I was on the point of throwing myself on my knees and praying to God:  but I feared that I should not know how to speak to Him, and that I might offend Him by praying badly.  Shall I confess to you a singular fancy that came upon me, a childish revelation, as it were, of poetic love from out of the chaos of my ignorance?  The moon was lighting up everything so plainly that I could distinguish the tiniest flowers in the grass.  A little meadow daisy seemed to me so beautiful with its golden calyx full of diamonds of dew and its white collaret fringed with purple, that I plucked it, and covered it with kisses, and cried in a sort of delirious intoxication: 

“It is you, Edmee!  Yes, it is you!  Ah, you no longer shun me!”

But what was my confusion when, on rising, I found there had been a witness of my folly.  Patience was standing before me.