Anyhow she counted she might reach Paris well in fifteen days.
She sat under a shrine in a by street a moment, and counted the copper pieces she had on her; they were few, and the poor pretty buckles that she might have sold to get money were stolen.
She had some twenty sous and a dozen eggs; she thought she might live on that; she had wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all, to keep life in her until she could reach Paris was the one great thing.
"What a blessing it is to have been born poor; and to have lived hardly--one wants so little!" she thought to herself.
Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom of her gown, and trimmed her little lantern and knelt down in the quiet darkness and prayed a moment, with the hot agonized tears rolling down her face, and then rose and stepped out bravely in the cool of the night, on the great southwest road towards Paris.
The thought never once crossed her to turn back, and go again into the shelter of her own little hut among the flowers.

He was sick there, dying, for anything she knew; that was the only thing she remembered.
It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere the fragrance of the spring was borne in from the wide green plains, and the streams where the rushes were blowing.
She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful gray shadow all about her.

She had never been so far from home in all her life, except to that one Kermesse at Mechlin.

But she was not afraid.
With the movement, and the air, and the sense that she was going to him, which made her happy even in her misery, something of the old, sweet, lost fancies came to her.
She smiled at the stars through her tears, and as the poplars swayed and murmured in the wind, they looked to her like the wings and the swords of a host of angels.
Her way lay out through the forest, and in that sweet green woodland she was not afraid--no more afraid than the fawns were.
At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed.

Here there were the open-air restaurants, and the cafe gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers from the city; here there were music and laughter, and horses with brass bells, and bright colors on high in the wooden balconies, and below among the blossoming hawthorn hedges.