resembling glowing sparks. By degrees Miette and Silvere had walked
fully a league. They gazed at the intervening road, full of silent
admiration for the vast amphitheatre which rose to the verge of the
heavens, and over which flowed bluish streams of light, as over the
superposed rocks of a gigantic waterfall. The strange and colossal
picture spread out amid deathlike stillness and silence. Nothing could
have been of more sovereign grandeur.

Then the young people, having leant against the parapet of the bridge,
gazed beneath them. The Viorne, swollen by the rains, flowed on with a
dull, continuous sound. Up and down stream, despite the darkness which
filled the hollows, they perceived the black lines of the trees growing
on the banks; here and there glided the moonbeams, casting a trail of
molten metal, as it were, over the water, which glittered and danced
like rays of light on the scales of some live animal. The gleams darted
with a mysterious charm along the gray torrent, betwixt the vague
phantom-like foliage. You might have thought this an enchanted valley,
some wondrous retreat where a community of shadows and gleams lived a
fantastic life.

This part of the river was familiar to the lovers; they had often come
here in search of coolness on warm July nights; they had spent hours
hidden among the clusters of willows on the right bank, at the spot
where the meadows of Sainte-Claire spread their verdant carpet to the
waterside. They remembered every bend of the bank, the stones on which
they had stepped in order to cross the Viorne, at that season as narrow
as a brooklet, and certain little grassy hollows where they had indulged
in their dreams of love. Miette, therefore, now gazed from the bridge at
the right bank of the torrent with longing eyes.