dark cave shone as white flesh and youth can shine through the veils of
a mourner.

They no longer lived their own separate lives; they had come together at
each other's call.

"I thought you wouldn't come."

"Why, why did you think that?"

Little questions and little answers fell in a sudden rain from their
lips. Yet while Fanny spoke he did not seem to know what she said, and
answered at random, or sometimes he did not answer at all, but smiled.

Afraid of the fragile avowal of silence, evading it, she found little
words to follow one another. But he answered less and less, and smiled
at her, till his face was full of this smile. So then she said: "We'll
go out and walk by the river," and he rose at once and followed her
among the forest of wooden chairs. They forgot that he was to have shown
her the Cathedral. In all its length she never saw one statue except
the first Madonna, not one stone face but his young face with the cold
light upon it, his hands as white as stones, as long and fine as any of
the carved fingers which prayed around them.

They walked together down the winding path below the bridge to the very
edge of the Moselle, which lay in light winter sunlight, its banks
buried in shrubberies of green.

Mont St. Quentin, conical, covered with waving trees, shone like a hill
in summer, and beyond it the indigo forest of every Lorraine horizon