"Allow me, whatever happens, whether M. Raindal goes there or not--to accompany you at Langrune. This vacation of yours which was to separate us was a cause of serious pain to me.... More than once, I was on the verge of asking your leave to come.... I delayed my prayer for fear of displeasing you.... I am bolder now.... Tell me, may I?" Thereupon Mlle. Raindal stretched out her hand once more: "What a thing to ask! M. Boerzell! I shall be delighted!..." He felt bold enough this time for a kiss of thanksgiving. Thérèse thoughtlessly complained of being thirsty. He ran out to his room and came back with a tray. In an instant he had prepared a glass of sugar and water in which he poured a few drops of rum. "A bachelor's home, a savant's home!" he grumbled jestingly, as he stirred the mixture.... "No cordial ... no smelling salts ... nothing that is needed for receiving ladies!" He corrected himself at once: "Pshaw!... There, I am again alluding to marriage.... I had forgotten that my promise was on again...." Thérèse drank greedily, her eyes smiling at him. The clock struck three and she started. "I was forgetting my poor mother!... Good-by.... Thank you again with all my heart!... Till next Sunday then? Perhaps we shall have good news!..." "It is my dearest wish, mademoiselle!" Boerzell replied skeptically. He leaned out of his window to watch her go. She walked with a virile and well-balanced step; she made her way among the passers-by holding her head somewhat haughtily as only those women do who have a consciousness of their own charm, or a pride in their thoughts. Boerzell felt instinctively that it was no longer a young girl who was walking away from him: it was rather a sort of leader, a mother by right of intellect--the true head of the Raindal family. She turned into the next street and was no longer visible to him.... He closed the window. He felt his breast swelling in a glorious satisfaction. Their behavior, the cordial chastity of their interview seemed to him to stamp them out as people who were far from being vulgar. "We have been very chic!" he summarized, falling back into his student dialect. Then he sat down at his table once more, his eyes dreamy, as if he were voicing a wish: "If she only would!" he murmured.... "What a companion for me! What a wife!... She is a man ... a man in the finest meaning of the word!" CHAPTER XVI M. Raindal reached the station fifteen minutes before the departure of the train which was to take him to Les Frettes. He paced the platform, thinking. Most of the carriages were empty. On the deserted platform he saw not a porter, not a truck; it stretched out, an endless carpet of asphalt. The glass roof refracted a dark, heavy heat. It was that hour of semi-rest, between the end of morning and the beginning of afternoon, when everything seems to be dozing in the railway stations, apart from the engines, the men, the wagons and the goods.