mistake, and breathed again. He had often asked how he ought to behave if he met her face to face. Should he bow, or should he seem not to have seen her. “I should not see her,” he thought.
It was cold; the gutters were frozen, and the pavement dry and gray in the gaslight. When he got home he thought: “I must change my lodgings; this is no longer good enough for me.” He felt nervous and lively, capable of anything; and he said aloud, as he walked from his bed to the window: “It is fortune at last—it is fortune! I must write to father.” From time to time he wrote to his father, and the letter always brought happiness to the little Norman inn by the roadside, at the summit of the slope overlooking Rouen and the broad valley of the Seine. From time to time, too, he received a blue envelope, addressed in a large, shaky hand, and read the same unvarying lines at the beginning of the paternal epistle. “My Dear Son: This leaves your mother and myself in good health. There is not much news here. I must tell you, however,” etc. In his heart he retained a feeling of interest for the village matters, for the news of the neighbours, and the condition of the crops.