It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere the fragrance of the spring
was borne in from the wide green plains, and the streams where the rushes
were blowing.
She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful gray shadow all about her. She
had never been so far from home in all her life, except to that one
Kermesse at Mechlin. But she was not afraid.
With the movement, and the air, and the sense that she was going to him,
which made her happy even in her misery, something of the old, sweet,
lost fancies came to her.
She smiled at the stars through her tears, and as the poplars swayed and
murmured in the wind, they looked to her like the wings and the swords
of a host of angels.
Her way lay out through the forest, and in that sweet green woodland she
was not afraid--no more afraid than the fawns were.
At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed. Here there were the open-air
restaurants, and the cafe gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers
from the city; here there were music and laughter, and horses with brass
bells, and bright colors on high in the wooden balconies, and below among
the blossoming hawthorn hedges.
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