The most appalling time was the close of day. Night fell late at that time of the year; and it would have been sweet indeed to go down to the summer-house after dinner. She had not a doubt but that Guillaume was regular in his attendance at their former trysting-place. He must be stretching out his arms to her now, calling her, entreating her, reproaching her: oh, the torture of not being able to go to him! She never ceased thinking of him. The memories of their common past formed the only charm of the present; and, by one of love’s illusions, she made her own memories begin on the very day on which Guillaume’s began. And so she remembered the minute when he had caught her raising her mourning-veil in the garden by the ruins. She remembered the moment when, hiding behind a curtain, he had come near to her for the first time. Had she not always loved him? Why had she, from the first and despite Guillaume’s deliberate rebuffs, sought to tame him, as Mme. de la Vaudraye called it, and to win his liking? Why also her impulse of friendship towards the mysterious unknown? Gilberte took little or no heed of what the town said of all these happenings, having asked Adèle not to tell her: an order which the unfortunate servant found great difficulty in obeying! Domfront was bubbling and seething with comments! For, after all, there was this undeniable fact: in the sight of the whole world, as everybody could bear witness, a formal proposal had been made for Gilberte’s hand in marriage; and it resulted in a breach between the La Vaudrayes and Mme. Armand. A complete breach! For they no longer even saw one another. And the inexplicable thing was that, since that famous afternoon, Mme. Armand had not once left the Logis. What was underneath it all? From which side did the breach come? A score of contradictory versions went the round of the town, but none of them bore the marks of indisputable authenticity upon which the ever-scrupulous world insists before accepting a piece of gossip as fact. As for Mme. Duval, she was in a desperate plight. Pressed with questions, she was reluctantly compelled to admit that she knew nothing. After the first fortnight, Gilberte, who dared not walk in her garden, ventured to go out once or twice, but only at times and in directions where she ran no risk of meeting people. Generally in the early morning, she would slip out by a side-door and make her way down to the river by the most shady and roundabout paths of the wood skirting the Logis.