The morning after the storm Clara is well enough for breakfast, but M. Verneuil has spent the night in pain from his arm, and Madame La Luc's balsam has for once failed. At his request she gives it up for a soothing fomentation. La Luc, grateful, begs him to stay, and since riding on would be dangerous, he accepts. In the evening they walk through the village, where the peasants ask eagerly after Clara, and La Luc says he lives among his children. On a green summit La Luc steps away, and Verneuil finds him leaning against an urn under a weeping willow. The inscription says it was raised to the memory of Clara La Luc "in testimony of the affection of a husband". La Luc cannot answer in words, but afterwards he tells Verneuil that bringing him there is a mark of esteem. He has kept his wife's memory as a treasure to which he can withdraw, and a faith in meeting again those we love ought to be cherished, he says, whether or not it is an illusion. At supper in the hall he teaches the girls astronomy, and Verneuil says he ought to seek no further, "for here wisdom and happiness dwell together".
Verneuil stays a week. When he leaves, promising to return by way of Leloncourt, Adeline, alarmed by La Luc's declining health, prays that he may live to receive the visit. The quiet that follows brings no respite: the fatigue of the excursions has deepened his illness into what looks like a consumption. A physician in Geneva recommends the air of Nice. La Luc, believing his life precarious, hesitates and hates to leave his parish, until the parishioners go in a body to beg him to go. On the morning he sets out, the village gathers at his door, and he tells them: "We shall meet again, if not in this world, I hope in a better." With Clara, Adeline and Peter he rides away, looking back towards the urn, which the morning mist hides from him.
At Nice, Adeline sees the sea for the first time, and the city disappoints after its beautiful approach. La Luc befriends a melancholy Frenchman, M. Amand, who has refused every invitation, and Adeline pities him before she has spoken to him but holds back from intruding. Later La Luc introduces him, and he begins to visit, to read aloud to the ladies, and to listen to Clara's lute without ever playing it. One evening on the terrace Adeline sings "Titania to Her Love" and hears him murmur two of its lines. He takes the lute, sings a sonnet about love's first gentle sway, bursts into tears, and walks away. When he returns he says she is the image of a lady he has lost for ever. His eyes turn wild, and Adeline calms him by playing the air he asks for. He begs her never to mention what she has seen, and she promises.
La Luc's health keeps failing, and after nearly three weeks the physician honestly admits that he has little hope from the climate and suggests a sea voyage, or failing that Montpellier. When Amand meets Adeline on the shore, he says he will leave Nice, since no climate can relieve the sickness of the heart. "You have been unhappy, Adeline," he says. "I knew it from the first." She tells him time will blunt sorrow while her tears say otherwise, and the narrator adds that he is a widower whose wife died in childbirth and whose infant soon followed her. When La Luc embarks for Languedoc, Amand takes them to the sea-side, cannot say farewell, and stands waving until the tears blind him. Adeline says that so has vanished her prospect of happiness, and that her future is like the waste of waters around her. Far out at sea she is awed by the boundless water, until the thought that a plank alone separates her from death turns that feeling into terror, and she hastily looks away.
