“Go on! Go on! Tell me all you heard!”
At an utter loss to understand, Raoul answered: “I heard him reply, when you said you had given him your soul, ‘Your soul is a beautiful thing, child, and I thank you. No emperor ever received so fair a gift. The angels wept tonight.’ ”
Christine carried her hand to her heart, a prey to indescribable emotion. Her eyes stared before her like a madwoman’s. Raoul was terror-stricken. But suddenly Christine’s eyes moistened and two great tears trickled, like two pearls, down her ivory cheeks.
“Christine!”
“Raoul!”
The young man tried to take her in his arms, but she escaped and fled in great disorder.
While Christine remained locked in her room, Raoul was at his wit’s end what to do. He refused to breakfast. He was terribly concerned and bitterly grieved to see the hours, which he had hoped to find so sweet, slip past without the presence of the young Swedish girl. Why did she not come to roam with him through the country where they had so many memories in common? He heard that she had had a mass said, that morning, for the repose of her father’s soul and spent a long time praying in the little church and on the fiddler’s tomb. Then, as she seemed to have nothing more to do at Perros and, in fact, was doing nothing there, why did she not go back to Paris at once?
Raoul walked away, dejectedly, to the graveyard in which the church stood and was indeed alone among the tombs, reading the inscriptions; but, when he turned behind the apse, he was suddenly struck by the dazzling note of the flowers that straggled over the white ground. They