"Let us see," said she, stopping to reflect. "I think my best course is not to join them, but to leave Colombe free to select her purchases and her gifts. It would not be becoming for me to be there, if, as is probable, she puts something aside for me. I will arrive when she has completed her purchases, and then I should certainly be very ungrateful to refuse. That's what I'll do, stay here and not embarrass the dear, kind-hearted child."
It will be seen that the good woman was not deficient in delicacy.
For ten days past Colombe had not found it necessary to ask herself if Ascanio had become her dearest thought. The pure-souled, unsophisticated child did not know what love was, but her heart was overflowing with love. She told herself that she did wrong to indulge in such dreams, but she excused herself on the ground that she certainly should never see Ascanio again, and that she should not have the consolation of justifying herself in his eyes.
Upon this pretext she passed all her evenings upon the bench where he had sat beside her, and there she would talk to him, listen to him, and concentrate her whole soul upon the memory. And when the darkness came on, and Dame Perrine bade her retire, the lovely dreamer would return to the house with reluctant steps, and not until she was recalled to herself would she remember her father's commands, Comte d'Orbec, and the rapid flight of time. Her sleepless nights were hard to bear, but not sufficiently so to efface the charm of her visions of the evening.
On this evening, as usual, Colombe was living over again the delicious hour she had passed with Ascanio, when, happening to raise her eyes, she uttered a sharp cry.
He was standing before her, gazing at her in silence.
He found her changed, but lovelier than ever. Pallor and melancholy were most becoming to her ideally beautiful face. She seemed to belong still less to earth. And so Ascanio, gazing admiringly upon her enhanced charms, was assailed once more by his former modest apprehensions, which Madame d'Etampes's passion had dissipated for a moment. How could this celestial creature ever love him?
The two lovely children, who had loved each other so long without a word, and who had already suffered so much, were at last face to face. They ought, no doubt, to have traversed in an instant the space they had traversed step by step, and separately, in their dreams. They might now come to an understanding first of all, and then allow all their long pent-up emotion to find expression in an outburst of joy.
But they were both too timid for that, and although their emotion betrayed each to the other, their angel hearts did not come together until they had first made a detour.
Colombe, speechless and blushing, had risen to her feet by a sudden impulse. Ascanio, pale with the intensity of his emotion, repressed with a trembling hand the rapid beating of his heart.