Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he appeared.
The day after the show he had said to himself—“We mustn’t go back too soon; that would be a mistake.”
And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he had thought it was too late, and then he reasoned thus—
“If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me again love me more. Let’s go on with it!”
And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the room, he saw Emma turn pale.
She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral.
Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first conventional phrases.
“I,” he said, “have been busy. I have been ill.”
“Seriously?” she cried.
“Well,” said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, “no; it was because I did not want to come back.”
“Why?”
“Can you not guess?”