In the far corner of the darkened carriage Thérèse looked back upon those innocent days,--innocent, but gladdened by a fleeting happiness, half understood: and she could not know that this transient gleam was all the happiness ever to be hers. Nothing warned her that her fate was laid in a darkened drawing-room, encompassed by the pitiless summer, on a red-plush sofa by the side of Anne, who sat poring over a photograph album on her knees. Why was she so happy? She and Anne had hardly a single taste in common. Anne hated reading, and did nothing but sew, chatter, and giggle. She had not an idea in her head, while Thérèse devoured with equal voracity the novels of Paul de Kock, the _Causeries du Lundi_, the _History of the Consulate_, indeed all that miscellaneous literature that lies about in cupboards in a house in the country. Sometimes Anne got up to see whether the heat had passed: but as the light burst through the half-open shutters, like a splash of molten metal, it seemed to burn the matting on the floor and they had to shut everything up once more and crouch indoors. Even at sunset, when only the feet of the pines glowed in the level rays, and a last persistent grasshopper could still be heard deep down among the herbage, the heat still hovered stagnant under the oak trees. The two friends lay stretched upon the grass at the edge of the field, as they might have sat down on the shore of a lake. Stormy clouds called up fleeting pictures as they passed; but before Thérèse could make out the winged lady that Anne saw in the sky, it had changed, she said, into some strange elongated beast.