athénaïse spent a day of supreme happiness and expectancy. the fair sight of the country unfolding itself before her was balm to her vision and to her soul. she was charmed with the rather unfamiliar, broad, clean sweep of the sugar plantations, with their monster sugar-houses, their rows of neat cabins like little villages of a single street, and their impressive homes standing apart amid clusters of trees. there were sudden glimpses of a bayou curling between sunny, grassy banks, or creeping sluggishly out from a tangled growth of wood, and brush, and fern, and poison-vines, and palmettos. and passing through the long stretches of monotonous woodlands, she would close her eyes and taste in anticipation the moment of her meeting with cazeau. she could think of nothing but him.
103it was night when she reached her station. there was montéclin, as she had expected, waiting for her with a two-seated buggy, to which he had hitched his own swift-footed, spirited pony. it was good, he felt, to have her back on any terms; and he had no fault to find since she came of her own choice. he more than suspected the cause of her coming; her eyes and her voice and her foolish little manner went far in revealing the secret that was brimming over in her heart. but after he had deposited her at her own gate, and as he continued his way toward the rigolet, he could not help feeling that the affair had taken a very disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all. he left her in cazeau’s keeping.
her husband lifted her out of the buggy, and neither said a word until they stood together within the shelter of the gallery. even then they did not speak at first. but athénaïse turned to him with an appealing gesture. as he clasped her in his arms, he felt the yielding of her whole body against him. he felt her lips for the first time respond to the passion of his own.
104the country night was dark and warm and still, save for the distant notes of an accordion which some one was playing in a cabin away off. a little negro baby was crying somewhere. as athénaïse withdrew from her husband’s embrace, the sound arrested her.
“listen, cazeau! how juliette’s baby is crying! pauvre ti chou, i wonder w’at is the matter with it?”
