The sun was already high in the heavens when I woke, and my room was
flooded with light. The redbreasts were chirping and pecking at the
vines and currant bushes beneath my windows; all nature seemed to be
illumined and adorned and to have awakened before me, to usher in and
welcome this first day of my new life. All the sounds and noises in the
house seemed joyful as I was. I heard the light steps of the maid who
went and came in the passage to carry breakfast to her mistress, the
childish voices of the little girls of the mountains who brought
flowers from the edge of the glaciers, and the tinkling bells and
stamping hoofs of the mules which were waiting in the yard to carry her
to the lake or to the mountain. I changed my soiled and dusty clothes,
I bathed my red and swollen eyes, smoothed my disordered hair, put on
my leather gaiters, like a chamois hunter of the Alps, and taking my
gun in hand, I went down to join the old doctor and his family at the
breakfast-table.
At breakfast they talked of the storm on the lake, of the danger in
which the stranger had been, her fainting at Haute-Combe, her absence
during two days, and my good fortune in having met with her and brought
her home. I begged the doctor to request for me the favor of inquiring
in person after her health, and accompanying her in her excursions. He
came down again with her; she looked lovelier and more interesting than
ever, and happiness seemed to have given her fresh youth. She enchanted
every one, but she looked only at me. I alone understood her looks and
words with their double meaning. The guides lifted her joyfully on the
seat with the swinging foot-board, which serves as a saddle for the
women of Savoy; and I walked beside the mule with the tinkling bells
which was that day to carry her to the highest chalets of the mountain.
We passed the whole day there, but we scarcely spoke, so well did we
already understand each other without words. Sometimes we stood
contemplating the cheerful valley of Chambery which appeared to widen
as we mounted higher; or we loitered on the edge of cascades, whose
sun-tinted vapors enveloped us in watery rainbows that seemed to be the
mysterious halo of our love; or we would gather the latest flowers of
earth on the sloping meadows before the chalets, and exchange them
between us, as the letters of the fragrant alphabet of Nature,
intelligible to us alone; or we gathered chestnuts which we brought
home to roast at night by her fire; or we sat under shelter of the
highest chalets which were already abandoned by their owners, and
thought how happy two beings like ourselves might be, confined by fate
to one of these deserted huts, made from rough boards and trunks of
trees,--so near the stars, so near the murmuring winds, the snows and
glaciers, but divided from man by solitude, and sufficing to each other
during a life filled with one thought and but one feeling!