She liked those evenings best when the sky was tender primrose colour, and the dusky trees stood up against it in soft, shady, mysterious masses, with strangely bright bars of colour gleaming through them. There were disused fortifications, an old gateway, and a bridge; above these houses jumbled oddly together clambering up the side of the hill. She liked to watch the water slip calmly by, the leaves floating on its surface, the long grasses under the bank breaking it into little brown eddies. There were quiet shadows, shadows always comprehensible, never terrible; shadows which stole gently down to the roots of the willows, by which the river rolled along, catching their reflection on its surface, and then suddenly lit up with a sheet of tremulous golden light. A little rough causeway ran by the waterside, here and there a stunted sapling thrust itself out as though to kiss the stream that moved on regardless; here and there were little wooden standing-places--_lavatoires_--for the washerwomen, who all day long thumped and gesticulated and chattered shrilly, but in the evening left the river to its own unceasing songs. It was a very quiet, out-of-the-way little corner. The cornfields stretched far away--great flat plains; a bird might cry in the distance, the church bells clang, a peasant in his blouse go by and wish them good evening; except these signs of life there was very little to disturb them. Nannon thought it _triste_; but it seemed to bring refreshment to Therese, who never before had liked silence and solitude. She was ill at this time, I think; feverish, restless, and sick with hope deferred. She had been waiting for two years, at her age a lifetime. Separation had not before been so cruel as it was now that the great bar between her and Fabien was gone, and only his presence was needed. Perhaps her hopefulness would have sunk altogether under the strain if it had not been for the river and Nannon.