Page 206 - madame-bovary

CHAPTER NINE

ix weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last
Sone evening he appeared.
The day after the show he had said to himself—‘We
mustn’t go back too soon; that would be a mistake.’
And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. Af-
ter the hunting he had thought it was too late, and then he
reasoned thus—
‘If from the first day she loved me, she must from impa-
tience to see me again love me more. Let’s go on with it!’
And he knew that his calculation had been right when,
on entering the room, he saw Emma turn pale.
She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin
curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the
gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell,
shone in the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral.
Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly an-
swered his first conventional phrases.
‘I,’ he said, ‘have been busy. I have been ill.’
‘Seriously?’ she cried.
‘Well,’ said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a foot-
stool, ‘no; it was because I did not want to come back.’
‘Why?’
‘Can you not guess?’
He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her

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