the morning.  Edmee’s obstinate refusals and the dismissal of M. de la Marche had caused great astonishment, and given rise to many conjectures among the curious.  One young man who was in love with her, and had been rejected like the rest, was impelled by a stupid and cowardly conceit to avenge himself on the only woman of his own class who, according to him, had dared to repulse him.  Having discovered that Edmee had been carried off by the Hamstringers, he spread a report that she had spent a night of wild debauch at Roche-Mauprat.  At best, he only deigned to concede that she had yielded only to violence.  Edmee commanded too much respect and esteem to be accused of having shown complaisance to the brigands; but she soon passed for having been a victim of their brutality.  Marked with an indelible stain, she was no longer sought in marriage by any one.  My absence only served to confirm this opinion.  I had saved her from death, it was said, but not from shame, and it was impossible for me to make her my wife; I was in love with her, and had fled lest I should yield to the temptation to marry her.  All this seemed so probable that it would have been difficult to make the public accept the true version.  They were the less ready to accept it from the fact that Edmee had been unwilling to put an end to the evil reports by giving her hand to a man she could not love.  Such, then, were the causes of her isolation; it was not until later that I fully understood them.  But I could see the austerity of the chevalier’s home and Edmee’s melancholy calm, and I was afraid to drop even a dry leaf in the sleeping waters.  Thus I begged the abbe to remain with them until my return.  I took no one with me except my faithful sergeant Marcasse.  Edmee had declared that he must not leave me, and had arranged that henceforth he was to share Patience’s elegant hut and administrative life.

I arrived at Roche-Mauprat one foggy evening in the early days of autumn; the sun was hidden, and all Nature was wrapped in silence and mist.  The plains were deserted; the air alone seemed alive with the noise of great flocks of birds of passage; cranes were drawing their gigantic triangles across the sky, and storks at an immeasurable height were filling the clouds with mournful cries, which fell upon the saddened country like the dirge of parting summer.  For the first time in the year I felt a chilliness in the air.  I think that all men are filled with an involuntary sadness at the approach of the inclement season.  In the first hoar-frosts there is something which bids man remember the approaching dissolution of his own being.