intervals between the floor and the rough wood-work of the door. Who
can describe the outpourings of our hearts, the words unused in the
ordinary language of men that seemed to be wafted like night-dreams
between heaven and earth, and were interrupted by silence in which our
hearts and not our lips communed revealed their unutterable thoughts?
At length the intervals of silence became longer, the voices grew
faster and, overcome with fatigue, I fell asleep, with my hand clasped
on my knees, and my cheek leaning against the wall.




XXV.


The sun was already high in the heavens when I woke, and my room was
flooded with light. The redbreasts were chirping and pecking at the
vines and currant bushes beneath my windows; all nature seemed to be
illumined and adorned and to have awakened before me, to usher in and
welcome this first day of my new life. All the sounds and noises in the
house seemed joyful as I was. I heard the light steps of the maid who
went and came in the passage to carry breakfast to her mistress, the
childish voices of the little girls of the mountains who brought
flowers from the edge of the glaciers, and the tinkling bells and
stamping hoofs of the mules which were waiting in the yard to carry her
to the lake or to the mountain. I changed my soiled and dusty clothes,
I bathed my red and swollen eyes, smoothed my disordered hair, put on
my leather gaiters, like a chamois hunter of the Alps, and taking my
gun in hand, I went down to join the old doctor and his family at the
breakfast-table.