“Tomorrow if you like. I shall be going to get some tobacco and I will call in, and at the dinner-hour come here, or to the bathhouse behind the kitchen garden. There will be nobody about. Besides after dinner everybody takes a nap.”
“All right then.”
A terrible excitement seized Eugène as he rode home. “What will happen? What is a peasant-woman like? Suppose it turns out that she is hideous, horrible? No, she is handsome,” he told himself, remembering some he had been noticing. “But what shall I say? What shall I do?”
He was not himself all that day. Next day at noon he went to the forester’s hut. Daniel stood at the door and silently and significantly nodded towards the wood. The blood rushed to Eugène’s heart, he was conscious of it and went to the kitchen garden. No one was there. He went to the bathhouse—there was no one about, he looked in, came out, and suddenly heard the crackling of a breaking twig. He looked round—and she was standing in the thicket beyond the little ravine. He rushed there across the ravine. There were nettles in it which he had not noticed. They stung him and, losing the pince-nez from his nose, he ran up the slope on the farther side. She stood there, in a white embroidered apron, a red-brown skirt, and a bright red kerchief, barefoot, fresh, firm, and handsome, and smiling shyly.
“There is a path leading round—you should have gone round,” she said. “I came long ago, ever so long.”
He went up to her and, looking her over, touched her.
A quarter of an hour later they separated; he found his pince-nez, called in to see Daniel, and in reply to his question: “Are you satisfied, master?” gave him a ruble and went home.