At other times when she had tempted him thus he had put aside her plan as impractical, even going so far once as to offer to leave first and send for her afterward when he should have obtained something to do in Paris. Disturbed, frightened, beggared of devices before this new assault, more keen than any of the others, and more pressing, he found himself trying still to hold her back. “Hush! I’m staying here, and I love you.” For the third time, masterful and overwrought, she repeated: “I shall leave to-night. The train for Italy passes through at midnight. At midnight I shall be free.” He knotted his hands in despair. “Hush!” “Free to cry out my love. Free, if you’re not there, to taste this new joy of crying without constraint. Free to adore you, if you come.” “For pity’s sake don’t tempt me any more.” “I’m suffocated in this town of yours. Its old houses smell musty. I am suffocated with tenderness, do you see? Here we shall always be kept apart. I want to enjoy my sorrow if you don’t come: if you do come I want to live and breathe. Will you come? Will you come to-night?” In the end she overpowered his senses with her kisses, and he promised. A moment she tasted her triumph in silence, then murmured: “I have forgotten all my past.” She led him away from their retreat, in front of the Calvary, round toward the sun. What use was there in any more concealment? They could see now in a great glory, under a clear sky, the radiant diverse forms of the land. There before them, stretching away to the farthest horizon, filling in all the empty space between the black masses of the Granier and the Roche du Guet, were the delicate outlines of the Dauphine Alps--the Sept-Laux, Berlange, and the Grand Charnier--powdered with the first snows and rosy now with the dying light of day. Less distant, and further to the right, the wooded slopes of Corbelet and Lepine, between which the valley of the Echelles was hollowed out, bore like a gold-red fleece the woods and forests that the autumn had set ablaze. Before these chains of mountains was a garland of delicate hills--Charmettes, Montagnole, Saint-Cassin, Vimines, whose soft curves and graceful undulations made one’s eyes love to dwell on them. Floods of light slipped down through their folds, making shafts of dust between their shadows. The sharp spires of the bell towers, the green and gold poplars, served as salient points in the scene. In the plain, Chambéry slumbered. And quite nearby, at the foot of the hill, a vine of dull red and gold threw in its striking note of joyousness. “Show me Italy,” she bade him.