After more than a year of attentions, signs, loving-making, little favours granted, refused, snatched by force, the inexorable door which shut me out at eleven o'clock would be softly reopened at half-past eleven, and behind that door I found two trembling lips, two caressing arms, a heart beating against my heart, burning sighs and lingering tears. Adèle too had managed to get a room to herself, apart from her mother, just as I had. This room was better than an ordinary room: it was a tiny summer-house which projected into a long garden enclosed only by hedges. A passage between the room occupied by her brother and the room occupied by her mother led to the garden, and consequently to the summer-house, which was only separated from the passage by a staircase leading to the first storey. It was the door of this passage, opening on one side into the street, and on the other, as I have said, into the garden, which was reopened to me at half-past eleven at night and was not closed behind me until three in the morning, on that night when my mother stood anxiously waiting, all in tears, at the window of my room, just ready to go and seek for me in the six hundred houses of the town. But what plagued my mother still more was--as I quickly discovered--that though she had not the least doubt as to the reason for my misconduct, she could not guess who was the young lady at the bottom of it. She had not seen me come back the way she had expected. The reason for that was simple enough. The little girl who had given her heart to me, after more than a year's struggle, was so pure, so innocent, so modest, that although my love and pride were ready to reveal everything, my conscience told me that honour and every fine feeling I had demanded that the secret be kept with the utmost care. Therefore, so that no one should see me at such an hour, either in the neighbourhood of her house, or in the street leading to it, when at three in the morning I came out of the blest passage that had served me in good stead, I made my exit by a little by-street, and gained the fields. From the fields I entered the park, leaping a ditch like the one over which I had given proofs of my agility to Mademoiselle Laurence, under such different circumstances, at Whitsuntide. Finally, from the park I reached what was called with us the "_manège_," and I re-entered the town by the rue du Château. It so happened, therefore, that my mother, who was watching in an entirely opposite direction, did not see me return, and, not guessing the ruse I had made use of to foil the cruel and ready slander little towns are so prone to set going, should matters so turn out, she puzzled her wits in despair to know where I had come from. My mother's ignorance and the suspicions that grew up in her mind later in connection with another girl had a sufficiently serious influence upon my future life for me to dwell on the subject for a moment: these details are not so trivial as they