She did not appear to say them by herself alone; they came to her as if sent by the beautiful night from the great white heavens, from the old trees, and the aged stones sleeping outside and dreaming aloud the fancies of the young girl.

From behind her voices also whispered them to her, the voices of her friends in the "Golden Legend," with whom she had peopled the air and the space around her.

In this atmosphere she had ever lived--mysticism, in which she revelled until it seemed fact on one side, and the daily work of life on the other.
Nothing seemed strange to her.
Now but one word remained to be said--that which would express all the long waiting, the slow creation of affection, the constantly increasing fever of restlessness.

It escaped from her lips like a cry from a distance, from the white flight of a bird mounting upward in the light of the early dawn, in the pure whiteness of the chamber behind her.
"I love you." Angelique, her two hands spread out, bent forward towards Felicien.

And he recalled to himself the evening when she ran barefooted through the grass, making so adorable a picture that he pursued her in order to stammer in her ear these same words: "I love you." He knew that now she was simply replying to him with the same cry of affection, the eternal cry, which at last came from her freely-opened heart.
"Yes, I love you.