She seemed surprised and repeated, gravely: “You love me ... you love me....” He watched her anxiously. But the bright features lit up anew and she said to Guillaume, gaily and blithely, as though she had made the most wonderful and unexpected of discoveries: “But, you know, Guillaume, I love you too.” She had the look of a delighted child. She could have clapped her hands, so great was the enchantment of that magnificent vision of love, so sweet was it to know that she loved and was loved. She leant over to him prettily: “Then you are the one I was loving all the time and it is you that I love, Guillaume?” “Gilberte ... please....” “What do you want? Tell me what you want, Guillaume.” “Your eyes, Gilberte, to kiss your innocent eyes, your eyes which are like the eyes of a little girl.” Closing the lids, she offered her eyes, as though it were a quite natural thing. He took her in his arms and drew her to him. But a shiver passed through her at once. She made an instinctive movement of resistance and moaned: “No ... no ... oh, please don’t!...” She was not laughing now. A blush covered her cheeks and forehead. She no longer dared look at him; and Guillaume’s eyes almost hurt her. This time, it was the real, perturbing, mysterious revelation of love. Shaken with emotion, she faltered: “Go away ... please go away....” He kissed the hem of her skirt, picked some leaves, some blades of grass that Gilberte’s feet had trodden and went away. VIII THE APPOITMENT “GILBERTE: “I must not see you again. When you read these lines, I shall have left Domfront. You are rich and I am poor: you need look for no other explanation of my departure and of my conduct in the past. I loved you from the first; and from the first I swore that I would shun you and for ever conceal the feeling with which you inspire me. “Do you now understand why I behaved so coldly to you from the beginning, though my heart throbbed at the mere sound of your voice; why I was so hard to my mother, whose plans were obvious to all and drove me to exasperation: I was afraid lest you should think that I was privy to them; why I kept in the background, hiding among those rocks, looking at you from a distance as at a goal which I knew was, and wished it to be, inaccessible?