Page 779 sur 2288

She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was

no longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking

of dogs showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that

was left was the empty fields all round, the village in front,

and he himself isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely

along the deserted highroad.

He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he

had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and

feelings of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least

like a shell. There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious

change had been accomplished. There was no trace of shell, and

there was stretched over fully half the sky an even cover of tiny

and ever tinier cloudlets. The sky had grown blue and bright; and

with the same softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his

questioning gaze.