II.
On that first morning,--the first after his arrival at Saint-Graal,
and the first, also, of the many on which they encountered each other
in the forest,--he was bent upon a sentimental pilgrimage to
Granjolaye. He was partly obeying, partly seeking, an emotion. His
mind, inevitably, was full of old memories; the melancholy by which
they were attended he found distinctly pleasant, and was inclined to
nurse. To revisit the scene of their boy-and-girl romance, would
itself be romantic. In a little while he would come to the park gates,
and could look up the long, straight avenue to the chateau,--there
where, when they were children, twenty years ago, he and she had
played so earnestly at being married, burning for each other with one
of those strange, inarticulate passions that almost every childhood
knows; and where now, worse than widowed, she withheld herself, in
silent, mysterious, tragical seclusion.
And then he heard the rhythm of a horse's hoofs; and looking forward,
down the green pathway, between the two walls of forest, he saw a lady
cantering towards him.
In an instant she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur
of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into
an image--which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and
piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered
in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a
_toque_, set upon a loosely-fastened mass of black hair; a face
intensely white--a softly-rounded face, but intensely white; soft full
lips, singularly scarlet; and large eyes, very dark.
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