Sitting, happy and content, upon the golden sands, they told each other their past, painful for him, but rich in dreams; dreamy for her, but full of painful pleasure.
"I never had a mother," said Gabrielle, "but my father has been good as God himself." "I never had a father," said the hated son, "but my mother was all of heaven to me." Etienne related his youth, his love for his mother, his taste for flowers.

Gabrielle exclaimed at his last words.

Questioned why, she blushed and avoided answering; then when a shadow passed across that brow which death seemed to graze with its pinion, across that visible soul where the young man's slightest emotions showed, she answered:-- "Because I too love flowers." To believe ourselves linked far back in the past by community of tastes, is not that a declaration of love such as virgins know how to give?
Love desires to seem old; it is a coquetry of youth.
Etienne brought flowers on the morrow, ordering his people to find rare ones, as his mother had done in earlier days for him.

Who knows the depths to which the roots of a feeling reach in the soul of a solitary being thus returning to the traditions of mother-love in order to bestow upon a woman the same caressing devotion with which his mother had charmed his life?
To him, what grandeur in these nothings wherein were blended his only two affections.

Flowers and music thus became the language of their love.