When she had reached her room she stood dazzled by the rays of the
declining moon, and stifled by the sweetness of the night. The clock
in the valley struck one, as if marking the end of a time that had been
interminable in its tediousness and bleakness. In the mirror she saw
her pale brown eyes, skin and tresses invested with a new allurement, a
new ardor.
His face sprang out before her--against the moonlit wall, in the
glazing of the pictures, on the dial of the clock. She saw his gray
eyes surrounded by the fine wrinkles of those who have peered across
glaring sands, and his black eyebrows united above his aquiline nose.
The qualities that made him her antithesis redoubled his worth; and the
prestige of romance clung round his head like a nimbus.
As she moved to and fro, the moonbeams followed her and embraced her;
they glorified her slender figure whose reflections she saw with a new
pride. The pale rays passed through her bosom, like a current from the
fabled regions of felicity. They renewed in her breast that agitation
as if all her fibers were emerging from inertia into the fullness of
life.
She lay on her bed wide eyed, as if floating in a tepid sea, buoyed up
by happiness and wonder.
Then she sat upright, stricken with terror. She had seen a clearing in
a jungle, and black savages seated round a body covered over with a
cloth. For a moment she thought that she had seen Madame Zanidov also,
trailing her barbaric gown away through a shaft of moonlight.