there were clouds of sadness too. They were days of confidence and work.
They had a beautiful light room, high up, with a wide view over the
fields. At night through the window they could see the strange shadows
of the clouds floating across the clear, dull darkness of the sky. Half
asleep, they could hear the joyous crickets chirping and the showers
falling; the breath of the autumn earth--honeysuckle, clematis, glycine,
and new-mown hay--filled the house and soothed their senses. The silence
of the night. In the distance dogs barked. Cocks crowed. Dawn comes. The
tinkling angelus rings in the distant belfry, through the cold, gray
twilight, and they shiver in the warmth of their nest, and yet more
lovingly hold each other close. The voices of the birds awake in the
trellis on the wall. Christophe opens his eyes, holds his breath, and
his heart melts as he looks down at the dear tired face of his sleeping
beloved, pale with the paleness of love....

Their love was no selfish passion. It was a profound love in
comradeship, in which the body also demanded its share. They did not
hinder each other. They both went on with their work. Christophe's
genius and kindness and moral fiber were dear to Francoise. She felt
older than he in many ways, and she found a maternal pleasure in the
relation. She regretted her inability to understand anything he played:
music was a closed book to her, except at rare moments, when she would
be overcome by a wild emotion, which came less from the music than from
her own inner self, from the passion in which she was steeped at that
time, she and everything about her, the country, people, color, and
sound. But she was none the less conscious of Christophe's genius,
because it was expressed in a mysterious language which she did not
understand. It was like watching a great actor playing in a foreign
language. Her own genius was rekindled by it. Christophe, thanks to
love, could project his ideas and body forth his passions in the mind of