The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled the eyes.  Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as it hummingbirds flying about had scattered their feathers.  Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk.  Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves.  Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles.

They returned to Yonville by the same road.  On the mud they saw again the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places.  Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand to kiss it.

She was charming on horseback—­upright, with her slender waist, her knee bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat flushed by the fresh air in the red of the evening.

On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road.  People looked at her from the windows.

At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles.

“Emma!” he said.

“What?”

“Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre’s.  He has an old cob, still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, and that could be bought; I am sure, for a hundred crowns.”  He added, “And thinking it might please you, I have bespoken it—­bought it.  Have I done right?  Do tell me?”

She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later—­

“Are you going out to-night?” she asked.

“Yes.  Why?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!”

And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up in her room.

At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves rustled and the reeds whistled.

But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face.  Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth.  Something subtle about her being transfigured her.  She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.  So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired!  She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.  An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights.