not bear to stay at Frapesle when I saw the lighted windows of
Clochegourde. I dressed, went softly down, and left the chateau by the
door of a tower at the foot of a winding stairway. The coolness of the
night calmed me. I crossed the Indre by the bridge at the Red Mill,
took the ever-blessed punt, and rowed in front of Clochegourde, where
a brilliant light was streaming from a window looking towards Azay.

Again I plunged into my old meditations; but they were now peaceful,
intermingled with the love-note of the nightingale and the solitary
cry of the sedge-warbler. Ideas glided like fairies through my mind,
lifting the black veil which had hidden till then the glorious future.
Soul and senses were alike charmed. With what passion my thoughts rose
to her! Again and again I cried, with the repetition of a madman,
"Will she be mine?" During the preceding days the universe had
enlarged to me, but now in a single night I found its centre. On her
my will and my ambition henceforth fastened; I desired to be all in
all to her, that I might heal and fill her lacerated heart.

Beautiful was that night beneath her windows, amid the murmur of
waters rippling through the sluices, broken only by a voice that told
the hours from the clock-tower of Sache. During those hours of
darkness bathed in light, when this sidereal flower illumined my
existence, I betrothed to her my soul with the faith of the poor
Castilian knight whom we laugh at in the pages of Cervantes,--a faith,
nevertheless, with which all love begins.

At the first gleam of day, the first note of the waking birds, I fled
back among the trees of Frapesle and reached the house; no one had
seen me, no one suspected by absence, and I slept soundly until the
bell rang for breakfast. When the meal was over I went down, in spite