And their voices died away, they stopped with their eyes fixed and lost on the sunny lake of the glazed work. A mirage rose up before them from this blinding water, they saw an endless succession of meadows, the Cotentin bathed in the balmy breath of the ocean, a luminous vapour, which melted the horizon into a delicate pearly grey. Below, under the colossal iron framework, in the silk hall, roared the business, the trepidation of the machine at work; the entire house vibrated with the trampling of the crowd, the bustle of the shopmen, and the life of the thirty thousand persons elbowing each other there; and they, carried away by their dreams, on feeling this profound and dull clamour with which the roofs were resounding, thought they heard the wind passing over the grass, shaking the tall trees. “Ah! Mademoiselle Denise,” stammered Deloche, “why aren't you kinder to me? I love you so much!” Tears had come into his eyes, and as she tried to interrupt him with a gesture, he continued quickly: “No--let me tell you these things once more. We should get on so well together! People always find something to talk about when they come from the same place.” He was choking, and she at last managed to say kindly: “You're not reasonable; you promised me never to speak of that again. It's impossible. I have a good friendship for you, because you're a nice fellow; but I wish to remain free.” “Yes, yes. I know it,” replied he in a broken voice, “you don't love me. Oh! you may say so, I quite understand it. There's nothing in me to make you love me. Listen, I've only had one sweet moment in my life, and that was when I met you at Joinville, do you remember? For a moment under the trees, when it was so dark, I thought your arm trembled, and was stupid enough to imagine----” But she again interrupted him. Her quick ear had just caught Bourdoncle's and Jouve's steps at the end of the corridor. “Hark, there's some one coming.” “No,” said he, preventing her leaving the window, “it's in the cistern: all sorts of extraordinary noises come up from it, as if there were some one inside.” And he continued his timid, caressing complaints. She was no longer listening to him, rocked into dreamland by this declaration of love, her looks wandering over the roofs of The Ladies' Paradise. To the right and the left of the glazed gallery, other galleries, other halls, were glistening in the sun, between the tops of the houses, pierced with windows and running along symmetrically, like the wings of a barracks. Immense metallic works rose up, ladders, bridges, describing a lacework of iron in the air; whilst the kitchen chimneys threw out an immense volume of smoke like a factory, and the great square cistern, supported in the air on wrought-iron pillars, assumed a strange, barbarous profile, hoisted up to this height by the pride of one man. In the distance, Paris was roaring.