She played with a ring she wore, and showed it to him. He touched the ring--and in a tumult of the spirit was holding her hand. They sat silent again. He knew that he ought to say something, that she was waiting for him to say something, that his long silence was ridiculous--and he could think of nothing to say. He was at once tremulous with joy and faint with fear--the fear that she would withdraw her hand before his effort had wrenched out words. She withdrew it. He gazed before him blankly. When he was a man, and recalled that evening, he wondered whether the atmosphere had seemed so much a part of his emotions at the time as it did in looking back. He wondered whether, in his heartthrobs and his sickness, he had been acutely conscious of the black shrubs in the moonlight, of all the soft sounds and odours that stole up on the air. He thought not. Yet long after her features, which he tried to vitalise, were hazy to him, he could still see clearly the position that the two chairs had occupied, could have sketched the terrace almost with the accuracy of a plan, and felt the night air of Rouen in his throat. Presently she said: "The head-waiter thinks some people who came from Italy must have brought the mosquitoes in their luggage." "Oh?" said the boy. "I believe this is a mosquito bite on my cheek," she added. "Look!" She turned her cheek, and leant forward. He leant forward too. Her face had never been so close to him, his fingers craved its softness--he only realised that, with courage, he might touch it with a finger. And the courage was not there. "My hand is cold," he said, hoarsely. And afterwards, too, he used to wonder whether he had been excusing his cowardice to himself, or to her. And yet it was with no abashment that he tramped his bedroom later. It was with an exaltation that panted for vast solitudes. The whirl of the unexpected was in his being. The marvel of her hand, the marvel that she had let him hold her hand, uplifted him beyond belief. And through all the turbulence of his pulses and his mind there was not a carnal thought, not an instant's base imagining. He adored her without desire, without reflection, without asking what he adored. When he was alone with her once more during some minutes he tried, trembling, to examine the ring again. "No," she said gently; "it's wrong." And in the next few days nothing happened, one day was like another. Then the date of his departure was settled. He looked for her as soon as he read the news, sought her dismayed because he was to go, and twice unhappy because on his last evening she would be out. She was shopping, and he met her at the corner of la Rue Thiers, where the horlogerie is. "I'm going," he said; "and my chum can't stay here!" "Is it fixed?" Her eyes were startled. He had never known her eyes were quite so blue. "Yes, he's travelling at night, and won't break the journey. I'm to be at the station."