We just say good-day when we meet, and she smiles at me.
I lean against a plane tree and think of Marie.

She is tall, fair, strong and amiable, and she goes modestly clad, like a wide-hipped Venus; her beautiful lips shine like her eyes.
To know her so near agitates me among the shadows.

If she appeared before me as she did the last time I met her; if, in the middle of the dark, I saw the shining radiance of her face, the swaying of her figure, traced in silken lines, and her little sister's hand in hers,--I should tremble.
But that does not happen.

The bluish, cold background only shows me the two second-floor windows pleasantly warmed by lights, of which one is, perhaps, she herself.

But they take no sort of shape, and remain in another world.
At last my eyes leave that constellation of windows among the trees, that vertical and silent firmament.