The sadness of night penetrated her heart.  And when the moon rose on the fields of olive-trees, seeing the soft lines of plains and of hills pass, Therese, in this landscape wherein everything spoke of peace and oblivion, and nothing spoke of her, regretted the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe with its radiating avenues, and the alleys of the park where, at least, the trees and the stones knew her.

Suddenly Choulette threw himself into the carriage.  Armed with his knotty stick, his face and head enveloped in red wool and a fur cap, he almost frightened her.  It was what he wished to do.  His violent attitudes and his savage dress were studied.  Always seeking to produce effects, it pleased him to seem frightful.

He was a coward himself, and was glad to inspire the fears he often felt.  A moment before, as he was smoking his pipe, he had felt, while seeing the moon swallowed up by the clouds, one of those childish frights that tormented his light mind.  He had come near the Countess to be reassured.

“Arles,” he said.  “Do you know Arles?  It is a place of pure beauty.  I have seen, in the cloister, doves resting on the shoulders of statues, and I have seen the little gray lizards warming themselves in the sun on the tombs.  The tombs are now in two rows on the road that leads to the church.  They are formed like cisterns, and serve as beds for the poor at night.  One night, when I was walking among them, I met a good old woman who was placing dried herbs in the tomb of an old maid who had died on her wedding-day.  We said goodnight to her.  She replied:  ’May God hear-you! but fate wills that this tomb should open on the side of the northwest wind.  If only it were open on the other side, I should be lying as comfortably as Queen Jeanne.’”

Therese made no answer.  She was dozing.  And Choulette shivered in the cold of the night, in the fear of death.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LADY OF THE BELLS

In her English cart, which she drove herself, Miss Bell had brought over the hills, from the railway station at Florence, the Countess Martin-Belleme and Madame Marmet to her pink-tinted house at Fiesole, which, crowned with a long balustrade, overlooked the incomparable city.  The maid followed with the luggage.  Choulette, lodged, by Miss Bell’s attention, in the house of a sacristan’s widow, in the shadow of the cathedral of Fiesole, was not expected until dinner.  Plain and gentle, wearing short hair, a waistcoat, a man’s shirt on a chest like a boy’s, almost graceful, with small hips, the poetess was doing for her French friends the honors of the house, which reflected the ardent delicacy of her taste.  On the walls of the drawing-room were pale Virgins, with long hands, reigning peacefully among angels, patriarchs, and saints in beautiful gilded frames.  On a pedestal stood a Magdalena, clothed only with her hair, frightful with thinness