“At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that took captive my life.  Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no doubt, do not remember it.”

“I do,” she said; “go on.”

“You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go out, standing on the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet with small blue flowers; and without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I went with you.  Every moment, however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly, and I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you completely, and unwilling to leave you.  When you went into a shop, I waited in the street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and counting the change on the counter.  Then you rang at Madame Tuvache’s; you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in front of the great heavy door that had closed after you.”

Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that she was so old.  All these things reappearing before her seemed to widen out her life; it was like some sentimental immensity to which she returned; and from time to time she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed—­

“Yes, it is true—­true—­true!”

They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large empty hotels.  They no longer spoke, but they felt as they looked upon each other a buzzing in their heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the fixed eyes of each of them.  They were hand in hand now, and the past, the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were confounded in the sweetness of this ecstasy.  Night was darkening over the walls, on which still shone, half hidden in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills representing four scenes from the “Tour de Nesle,” with a motto in Spanish and French at the bottom.  Through the sash-window a patch of dark sky was seen between the pointed roofs.

She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then she sat down again.

“Well!” said Leon.

“Well!” she replied.

He was thinking how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she said to him—­

“How is it that no one until now has ever expressed such sentiments to me?”

The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to understand.  He from the first moment had loved her, and he despaired when he thought of the happiness that would have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her earlier, they had been indissolubly bound to one another.

“I have sometimes thought of it,” she went on.

“What a dream!” murmured Leon.  And fingering gently the blue binding of her long white sash, he added, “And who prevents us from beginning now?”

“No, my friend,” she replied; “I am too old; you are too young.  Forget me!  Others will love you; you will love them.”

“Not as you!” he cried.

“What a child you are!  Come, let us be sensible.  I wish it.”