Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/157

Rh veined mahogany which came from Paris and which he had often been accustomed to wipe with the nap of his coat, when he thought he had detected a spot.

Madame de Rênal had climbed up at a run the hundred and twenty steps of the dovecot. She tied the corner of a white handkerchief to one of the bars of iron of the little window. She was the happiest of women. With tears in her eyes she looked towards the great mountain forest. "Doubtless," she said to herself, "Julien is watching for this happy signal."

She listened attentively for a long time and then she cursed the monotonous noise of the grasshopper and the song of the birds. "Had it not been for that importunate noise, a cry of joy starting from the big rocks could have arrived here." Her greedy eye devoured that immense slope of dark verdure which was as level as a meadow.

"Why isn't he clever enough," she said to herself, quite overcome, "to invent some signal to tell me that his happiness is equal to mine?" She only came down from the dovecot when she was frightened of her husband coming there to look for her.

She found him furious. He was perusing the soothing phrases of M. de Valenod and reading them with an emotion to which they were but little used.

"I always come back to the same idea," said Madame de Rênal seizing a moment when a pause in her husband's ejaculations gave her the possibility of getting heard. "It is necessary for Julien to travel. Whatever talent he may have for Latin, he is only a peasant after all, often coarse and lacking in tact. Thinking to be polite, he addresses inflated compliments to me every day, which are in bad taste. He learns them by heart out of some novel or other."

"He never reads one," exclaimed M. de Rênal. "I am assured of it. Do you think that I am the master of a house who is so blind as to be ignorant of what takes place in his own home."

"Well, if he doesn't read these droll compliments anywhere, he invents them, and that's all the worse so far as he is concerned. He must have talked about me in this tone in Verrières and perhaps without going so far," said Madame Rênal with the idea of making a discovery, "he may have