In the coupe, which followed the quays in the luminous dust of the setting sun, she listened without impatience to her husband confiding to her his successes as an orator, the intentions of his parliamentary groups, his projects, his hopes, and the necessity to give two or three political dinners.  She closed her eyes in order to think better.  She said to herself:  “I shall have a letter to-morrow, and shall see him again within eight days.”  When the coupe passed on the bridge, she looked at the water, which seemed to roll flames; at the smoky arches; at the rows of trees; at the heads of the chestnut-trees in bloom on the Cours-la-Reine; all these familiar aspects seemed to be clothed for her in novel magnificence.  It seemed to her that her love had given a new color to the universe.  And she asked herself whether the trees and the stones recognized her.  She was thinking; “How is it that my silence, my eyes, and heaven and earth do not tell my dear secret?”

M. Martin-Belleme, thinking she was a little tired, advised her to rest.  And at night, closeted in her room, in the silence wherein she heard the palpitations of her heart, she wrote to the absent one a letter full of these words, which are similar to flowers in their perpetual novelty:  “I love you.  I am waiting for you.  I am happy.  I feel you are near me.  There is nobody except you and me in the world.  I see from my window a blue star which trembles, and I look at it, thinking that you see it in Florence.  I have put on my table the little red lily spoon.  Come!  Come!” And she found thus, fresh in her mind, the eternal sensations and images.

For a week she lived an inward life, feeling within her the soft warmth which remained of the days passed in the Via Alfieri, breathing the kisses which she had received, and loving herself for being loved.  She took delicate care and displayed attentive taste in new gowns.  It was to herself, too, that she was pleasing.  Madly anxious when there was nothing for her at the postoffice, trembling and joyful when she received through the small window a letter wherein she recognized the large handwriting of her beloved, she devoured her reminiscences, her desires, and her hopes.  Thus the hours passed quickly.

The morning of the day when he was to arrive seemed to her to be odiously long.  She was at the station before the train arrived.  A delay had been signalled.  It weighed heavily upon her.  Optimist in her projects, and placing by force, like her father, faith on the side of her will, that delay which she had not foreseen seemed to her to be treason.  The gray light, which the three-quarters of an hour filtered through the window-panes of the station, fell on her like the rays of an immense hour-glass which measured for her the minutes of happiness lost.  She was lamenting her fate, when, in the red light of the sun, she saw the locomotive of the express stop, monstrous and docile, on the quay, and, in the crowd of travellers coming out of the carriages, Jacques approached her.  He was looking at her with that sort of sombre and violent joy which she had often observed in him.  He said: