ut she had never before remained
out so late.

The doctor's uneasiness increased when he perceived on the terrace the
chair, now vacant, in which the young girl had been sitting. He had
expected to find her asleep in it. Since she was not there, why had she
not come in. Where could she have gone at such an hour? The night was
beautiful: a September night, still warm, with a wide sky whose dark,
velvety expanse was studded with stars; and from the depths of this
moonless sky the stars shone so large and bright that they lighted the
earth with a pale, mysterious radiance. He leaned over the balustrade of
the terrace, and examined the slope and the stone steps which led down
to the railroad; but there was not a movement. He saw nothing but the
round motionless tops of the little olive trees. The idea then occurred
to him that she must certainly be under the plane trees beside the
fountain, whose murmuring waters made perpetual coolness around. He
hurried there, and found himself enveloped in such thick darkness that
he, who knew every tree, was obliged to walk with outstretched hands
to avoid stumbling. Then he groped his way through the dark pine grove,
still without meeting any one. And at last he called in a muffled voice:

"Clotilde! Clotilde!"

The darkness remained silent and impenetrable.

"Clotilde! Clotilde!" he cried again, in a louder voice. Not a sound,
not a breath. The very echoes seemed asleep. His cry was drowned in the
infinitely soft lake of blue shadows. And then he called her with all
the force of his lungs. He returned to the plane trees. He went back to
the pine grove, beside himself with fright, scouring the entire domain.
Then, suddenly, he found himself in the threshing yard.

At this cool and tranquil hour, the immense yard, the vast circular
paved court, slept too. It was so many years since grain had been
threshed here that grass had sprung up among the stones, quickly
scorched a russet brown by the sun, resembling the long threads of
a woolen carpet. And, under the tufts of this feeble vegetation, the
ancient pavement did not cool during the whole summer, smoking from
sunset, exhaling in the night the heat stored up from so many sultry
noons.

The yard stretched around, bare and deserted, in the cooling atmosphere,
under the infinite calm of the sky, and Pascal was crossing it to hurry
to the orchard, when he almost fell over a form that he had not
before observed, extended at full lengt