Her eyes also sparkled with extraordinary brilliancy.

“The storm makes them, I suppose,” murmured Georges, still trembling.

The storm was indeed near.  At brief intervals great clouds of leaves and dust whirled from one end of the avenue to the other.  They walked a few steps farther, then all three returned to the house.  The young women took their work, Georges tried to read a newspaper, while Madame Fromont polished her rings and M. Gardinois and his son-in-law played billiards in the adjoining room.

How long that evening seemed to Sidonie!  She had but one wish, to be alone-alone with her thoughts.

But, in the silence of her little bedroom, when she had put out her light, which interferes with dreams by casting too bright an illumination upon reality, what schemes, what transports of delight!  Georges loved her, Georges Fromont, the heir of the factory!  They would marry; she would be rich.  For in that mercenary little heart the first kiss of love had awakened no ideas save those of ambition and a life of luxury.

To assure herself that her lover was sincere, she tried to recall the scene under the trees to its most trifling details, the expression of his eyes, the warmth of his embrace, the vows uttered brokenly, lips to lips, it that weird light shed by the glow-worms, which one solemn moment had fixed forever in her heart.

Oh! the glow-worms of Savigny!

All night long they twinkled like stars before her closed eyes.  The park was full of them, to the farthest limits of its darkest paths.  There were clusters of them all along the lawns, on the trees, in the shrubbery.  The fine gravel of the avenues, the waves of the river, seemed to emit green sparks, and all those microscopic flashes formed a sort of holiday illumination in which Savigny seemed to be enveloped in her honor, to celebrate the betrothal of Georges and Sidonie.

When she rose the next day, her plan was formed.  Georges loved her; that was certain.  Did he contemplate marrying her?  She had a suspicion that he did not, the clever minx!  But that did not frighten her.  She felt strong enough to triumph over that childish nature, at once weak and passionate.  She had only to resist him, and that is exactly what she did.

For some days she was cold and indifferent, wilfully blind and devoid of memory.  He tried to speak to her, to renew the blissful moment, but she avoided him, always placing some one between them.

Then he wrote to her.

He carried his notes himself to a hollow in a rock near a clear spring called “The Phantom,” which was in the outskirts of the park, sheltered by a thatched roof.  Sidonie thought that a charming episode.  In the evening she must invent some story, a pretext of some sort for going to “The Phantom” alone.  The shadow of the trees across the path, the mystery of the night, the rapid walk, the excitement, made her heart beat deliciously.  She would find the letter saturated with dew, with the intense cold of the spring, and so white in the moonlight that she would hide it quickly for fear of being surprised.