The Red Lily, vol 3 | Page 9

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:
"At last, here you are. I feared to die before seeing you again. You do
not know, I did not know myself, what torture it is to live a week away
from you. I have returned to the little pavilion of the Via Alfieri. In the
room you know, in front of the old pastel, I have wept for love and
rage."
She looked at him tenderly.
"And I, do you not think that I called you, that I wanted you, that when
alone I extended my arms toward you? I had hidden your letters in the
chiffonier where my jewels are. I read them at night: it was delicious,
but it was imprudent. Your letters were yourself--too much and not
enough."
They traversed the court where fiacres rolled away loaded with boxes.
She asked whether they were to take a carriage.
He made no answer. He seemed not to hear. She said:
"I went to see your house; I did not dare go in. I looked through the
grille and saw windows hidden in rose-bushes in the rear of a yard,
behind a tree, and I said: 'It is there !' I never have been so moved."
He was not listening to her nor looking at her. He walked quickly with
her along the paved street, and through a narrow stairway reached a
deserted street near the station. There, between wood and coal yards,
was a hotel with a restaurant on the first floor and tables on the
sidewalk. Under the painted sign were white curtains at the windows.
Dechartre stopped before the small door and pushed Therese into the
obscure alley. She asked:

"Where are you leading me? What is the time? I must be home at half-
past seven. We are mad."
When they left the house, she said:
"Jacques, my darling, we are too happy; we are robbing life."
CHAPTER XXVI
IN DECHARTRE'S STUDIO
A fiacre brought her, the next day, to a populous street, half sad, half
gay, with walls of gardens in the intervals of new houses, and stopped
at the point where the sidewalk passes under the arcade of a mansion of
the Regency, covered now with dust and oblivion, and fantastically
placed across the street. Here and there green branches lent gayety to
that city corner. Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited
perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign
of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to her.
Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant with
a military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard covered
with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the janitor's box with
bird-cages at the windows. On that side rose, under a green trellis, the
mansard of the neighboring house. A sculptor's studio backed on it its
glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep in the dust. At
the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of monuments,
broken bases of columnettes. In the rear, the house, not very large,
showed the six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and
rosebushes.
Philippe Dechartre, infatuated with the architecture of the fifteenth
century in France, had reproduced there very cleverly the
characteristics of a private house of the time of Louis XII. That house,
begun in the middle of the Second Empire, had not been finished. The
builder of so many castles died without being able to finish his own
house. It was better thus. Conceived in a manner which had then its
distinction and its value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish,
having lost little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now

between the walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house,
by the roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows,
by the simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had caused to