She listened to such speeches with bowed head, allowing him to kiss her hands, and admitting silently but gracefully that she was indeed an angel misunderstood.

“I am too humiliated,” she would say; “my past has robbed the future of all security.”

It was a glorious day for Calyste when, arriving at Les Touches at seven in the morning, he saw from afar Beatrix at a window watching for him, and wearing the same straw hat she had worn on the memorable day of their first excursion.  For a moment he was dazzled and giddy.  These little things of passion magnify the world itself.  It may be that only Frenchwomen possess the art of such scenic effects; they owe it to the grace of their minds; they know how to put into sentiment as much of the picturesque as the particular sentiment can bear without a loss of vigor or of force.

Ah! how lightly she rested on Calyste’s arm!  Together they left Les Touches by the garden-gate which opens on the dunes.  Beatrix thought the sands delightful; she spied the hardy little plants with rose-colored flowers that grew there, and she gathered a quantity to mix with the Chartreux pansies which also grow in that arid desert, dividing them significantly with Calyste, to whom those flowers and their foliage were to be henceforth an eternal and dreadful relic.

“We’ll add a bit of box,” she said smiling.

They sat some time together on the jetty, and Calyste, while waiting for the boat to come over, told her of his juvenile act on the day of her arrival.

“I knew of your little escapade,” she said, “and it was the cause of my sternness to you that first night.”

During their walk Madame de Rochefide had the lightly jesting tone of a woman who loves, together with a certain tenderness and abandonment of manner.  Calyste had reason to think himself beloved.  But when, wandering along the shore beneath the rocks, they came upon one of those charming creeks where the waves deposit the most extraordinary mosaic of brilliant pebbles, and they played there like children gathering the prettiest, when Calyste at the summit of happiness asked her plainly to fly with him to Ireland, she resumed her dignified and distant air, asked for his arm, and continued their walk in silence to what she called her Tarpeian rock.

“My friend,” she said, mounting with slow steps the magnificent block of granite of which she was making for herself a pedestal, “I have not the courage to conceal what you are to me.  For ten years I have had no happiness comparable to that which we have just enjoyed together, searching for shells among those rocks, exchanging pebbles of which I shall make a necklace more precious far to me than if it were made of the finest diamonds.  I have been once more a little girl, a child, such as I was at fourteen or sixteen—­when I was worthy of you.  The love I have had the happiness to inspire in your heart has raised me in my own eyes.  Understand these words to their magical extent.  You have made me the proudest and happiest of my sex, and you will live longer in my remembrance, perhaps, than I in yours.”