less fearful for now he would have ^Eliana to defend,
and somehow this seemed to make all the difference.
She might even marry him before he went — these
days there were many such hasty unions — he would
ask her, as the time of his training was so near, and of
course she would answer: CI will many you at once —
I love you.' That was how ^Eliana would answer.
Illusions, they began to gather more swiftly, and now
they were shining like clouds of glory whose very
brightness rendered him blind to his youth, his
poverty, his mean situation. He saw himself as one
possessed of the earth in possessing the love of the
creature he loved, and suddenly he wanted to shout
for triumph; to shout till the moon fell out of the
sky, till the stars came tumbling down through the
roof, till the peaks of the Maures bowed their heads
and trembled.
cShe loves me! She loves me!5 he wanted to shout
to the moon, to the stars, to the trembling mountains.
But in spite of all this he began to feel shy and
intensely self-conscious as he dressed the next morning;
and his shyness increased as the morning wore on, so
that he dared not look at ^Eliana when she passed
the open door of the shop and gave him a nod and a
smile in passing. Scarlet to the ears he bent over his
work, pretending to be very deeply engrossed and
snapping his newest chisel in the process. Indeed he
would gladly have hidden himself, so painful had
become his confusion; would gladly have hidden
himself from Anfos who seemed to be watching his
every movement, from his mother who begged him
to eat his meal, from Anatole Kahn who made well-
meaning jokes, from Loup whose smirk was unbearably
sly, from his father whose patient eyes urged him to
speak by the depth of their kindness and understand-
ing — he greatly longed to lay down his tools and take
refuge in the solitude of the hills, there to pass those
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