“At last, here you are.  I feared to die before seeing you again.  You do not know, I did not know myself, what torture it is to live a week away from you.  I have returned to the little pavilion of the Via Alfieri.  In the room you know, in front of the old pastel, I have wept for love and rage.”

She looked at him tenderly.

“And I, do you not think that I called you, that I wanted you, that when alone I extended my arms toward you?  I had hidden your letters in the chiffonier where my jewels are.  I read them at night:  it was delicious, but it was imprudent.  Your letters were yourself—­too much and not enough.”

They traversed the court where fiacres rolled away loaded with boxes.  She asked whether they were to take a carriage.

He made no answer.  He seemed not to hear.  She said: 

“I went to see your house; I did not dare go in.  I looked through the grille and saw windows hidden in rose-bushes in the rear of a yard, behind a tree, and I said:  ‘It is there!’ I never have been so moved.”

He was not listening to her nor looking at her.  He walked quickly with her along the paved street, and through a narrow stairway reached a deserted street near the station.  There, between wood and coal yards, was a hotel with a restaurant on the first floor and tables on the sidewalk.  Under the painted sign were white curtains at the windows.  Dechartre stopped before the small door and pushed Therese into the obscure alley.  She asked: 

“Where are you leading me?  What is the time?  I must be home at half-past seven.  We are mad.”

When they left the house, she said: 

“Jacques, my darling, we are too happy; we are robbing life.”

CHAPTER XXVI

IN DECHARTRE’S STUDIO

A fiacre brought her, the next day, to a populous street, half sad, half gay, with walls of gardens in the intervals of new houses, and stopped at the point where the sidewalk passes under the arcade of a mansion of the Regency, covered now with dust and oblivion, and fantastically placed across the street.  Here and there green branches lent gayety to that city corner.  Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign of a locksmith.  Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to her.  Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle.  A servant with a military look opened the door.  She found herself in a yard covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the janitor’s box with bird-cages at the windows.  On that side rose, under a green trellis, the mansard of the neighboring house.  A sculptor’s studio backed on it its glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep in the dust.  At the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of monuments, broken bases of columnettes.  In the rear, the house, not very large, showed the six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and rosebushes.