had laid them bare; he
had examined them; he had catalogued them for thirty years past, but
his passion for life, his admiration for the forces of life, sufficed to
produce in him a perpetual gaiety, whence seemed to flow naturally his
love for others, a fraternal compassion, a sympathy, which were
felt under the roughness of the anatomist and under the affected
impersonality of his studies.

"Bah!" he ended, taking a last glance at the vast, melancholy plains.
"Le Paradou is no more. They have sacked it, defiled it, destroyed it;
but what does that matter! Vines will be planted, corn will spring up,
a whole growth of new crops; and people will still fall in love in
vintages and harvests yet to come. Life is eternal; it is a perpetual
renewal of birth and growth."

He took her arm again and they returned to the town thus, arm in arm
like good friends, while the glow of the sunset was slowly fading away
in a tranquil sea of violets and roses. And seeing them both pass again,
the ancient king, powerful and gentle, leaning against the shoulder of
a charming and docile girl, supported by her youth, the women of the
faubourg, sitting at their doors, looked after them with a smile of
tender emotion.

At La Souleiade Martine was watching for them. She waved her hand to
them from afar. What! Were they not going to dine to-day? Then, when
they were near, she said:

"Ah! you will have to wait a little while. I did not venture to put on
my leg of mutton yet."

They remained outside to enjoy the charm of the closing day. The pine
grove, wrapped in shadow, exhaled a balsamic resinous odor, and from
the yard, still heated, in which a last red gleam was dying away, a
chillness arose. It was like an assuagement, a sigh of relief, a resting
of surrounding Nature, of the puny almond trees, the twisted olives,
under the paling sky, cloudless and serene; while at the back of the
house the clump of plane trees was a mass of black and impenetrable
shadows, where the fountain was heard singing its eternal crystal song.

"Look!" said the doctor, "M. Bellombre has already dined, and he is
taking the air."

He pointed to a bench, on which a tall, thin old man of seventy was
sitting, with a long face, furrowed with wrinkles, and large, staring
eyes, and very correctly attired in a close-fitting coat and cravat.

"He is a wise man," murmured Clotilde. "He is happy."

"He!" cried Pascal. "I should hope not!"

He hated no one, and M. Be