From the height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake sending off its vapour into the air.
Clumps of trees here and there stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.
By the side, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered in the warm atmosphere.
The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco, deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them.
Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood.
She turned away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy.
The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.
Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.
“God protects us!” said Rodolphe.
“Do you think so?” she said.
“Forward! forward!” he continued.
He “tchk’d” with his tongue.
The two beasts set off at a trot.
Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma’s stirrup.
Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as they rode along.
At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg.
The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred.
There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves.
Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks.
They dismounted.
Rodolphe fastened up the horses.
She walked on in front on the moss between the paths.
But her long habit got in her way, although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her, saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.
She stopped.
“I am tired,” she said.
“Come, try again,” he went on. “Courage!”
Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man’s hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves.
“But where are we going?”
He did not answer.
She was breathing irregularly.
Rodolphe looked round him biting his moustache.
They came to a larger space where the coppice had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe began speaking to her of his love.
He did not begin by frightening her with compliments.
He was calm, serious, melancholy.
Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on the ground with the tip of her foot.
But at the words,
“Are not our destinies now one?”
“Oh, no!” she replied.
“You know that well.
It is impossible!”
She rose to go.
He seized her by the wrist.
She stopped. Then, having gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said hurriedly—
“Ah! do not speak of it again!
Where are the horses?
Let us go back.”
He made a gesture of anger and annoyance.
She repeated:
“Where are the horses?
Where are the horses?”