The girl consented on condition of a speedy restitution of the photograph, and was in agony until it was returned, accompanied by some very tender words from her friend.

He was charmed with the intellectual, passionate, and youthful face, with the sweetness of the great eyes, with the symmetry of the figure.

Then when they had arranged to meet, he coming from the Lake of Como, she from Brussels to Hergyswyl near Lucerne, both had been in a fever of apprehension.

She reflected: "The portrait pleased him, but the bearing of the real person, a line, the colour of the garments, the manner of meeting, the first words, the tone of voice, may perhaps destroy his love at one blow." He thought: "She knows my face, ravaged by time, my white hair, and she loves them in the picture, but I am ageing day by day; perhaps when she sees me this incredible love will be killed at a blow." He had reached Hergyswyl by boat some hours before her; she, leaving Basel in the morning, arrived by the Bruenigbahn in the afternoon.
"Do you know," Maria continued, "when I did not see you at the station, my first sensation was one of relief; I trembled so! The second sensation was different, was one of fright." Giovanni smiled, "You never told me that," said he.
The young wife looked up at him and smiled in her turn.
"Perhaps you yourself have never told me quite everything about those moments." Giovanni placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered in her ear: "That is true." She started, and then laughed at herself for starting, and Giovanni laughed with her.
"What, what ?" she cried, her face aglow, vexed but still laughing.

Her husband whispered again, in a tone of great mystery: "That your hat was in disorder!" "Oh, that is not true! Really not true!" Sparkling with mirth, and at the same time trembling at the idea of the great danger she had encountered unawares, she protested that it was impossible; she had looked in the mirror of her _necessaire_ so many times before reaching Hergyswyl.
Every moment of that hour passed two years before, they recalled together jestingly; she often kissing his breast, and he her hair.
Giovanni had not waited for her at the station, where there was a crowd of holiday-makers, but a few yards distant, on the road leading to the hotel.