In a little over a week Adeline is strong enough to leave her room, and within a fortnight La Luc takes her into his study to say that, since she is so unfortunate in her father, she should think of him as her parent and his house as her home: "You and Clara shall be equally my daughters." She cannot finish thanking him, and he presses her hand and walks out to hide his own feeling. Adeline is still not at peace. She never mentions Theodore, even to Clara, and at night she sees him in chains or led out to execution. By day she escapes into La Luc's library and into long walks alone with a volume of Shakespeare or Milton, where she retraces Theodore's face and manner until despair rises and she hurries home to hide in La Luc's conversation. La Luc puts her sadness down to her father's cruelty, which only endears her to him more.
One evening, alone by the lake, she hears a French horn from a pleasure boat and composes a set of stanzas. La Luc, who has noticed how low her spirits stay, proposes an excursion on horseback to the Glacier of Montanvert, with Peter carrying a basket of food. They rest beside a ruined castle, where Clara says how delightful it would be to spend a whole life under such shades with the friends one loves, and Adeline turns away to hide tears, because the wish brings Theodore to mind.
On the way home a storm closes in. A peal of thunder frightens Clara's horse, which bolts down the mountain towards the lake while La Luc watches in agony. A stranger on the road catches the bridle, but the sudden check throws Clara to the ground and the horse plunges into the water. She says "Dear Sir, I am not hurt" while blood runs down her cheek. In fact she has a bruise and a cut on the forehead, and the stranger has sprained his shoulder. He refuses thanks as the impulse of common humanity.
At the chateau Madame La Luc dresses Clara's bruises and presses her balsam on the stranger, who is the chevalier M. Verneuil. La Luc will not let him leave that night, and the two men talk until late. Verneuil says that if wisdom means looking beyond happiness, he would rather be without it, since the English seem wise and unhappy and the French happy and foolish. La Luc replies that the end of wisdom is happiness and warns against writers who show only the dark side of human nature, like a painter who paints only black things and calls it nature. Verneuil answers that anyone who would persuade men to be good ought to show them that they are great, and they part for the night pleased with each other.
Coming Up in Chapter 18
At breakfast Clara is well again, but M. Verneuil has spent the night in pain from his arm, and Madame La Luc's balsam has for once failed. He accepts La Luc's invitation to stay. The two men walk up to a green summit, where La Luc leans silently against an urn under a weeping willow, and Verneuil reads its inscription.
