ever have suspected how much passion, how
many dreams, what poetry and hope there could be contained in that
little green corner, hardly larger than the shadow a fern throws on the
moss?

"You were right; I did not know the Bois," said Paul in a low voice to
Aline, who was leaning on his arm.

They were following a narrow path overarched by the boughs of trees, and
as they talked were moving forward at a quick pace, well in advance
of the others. It was not, however, _pere_ Kontzen's terrace nor his
appetizing fried dishes that drew them on. No; the beautiful lines
which they had just heard had carried them away, lifting them to great
heights, and they had not yet come down to earth again. They walked
straight on towards the ever-retreating end of the road, which opened
out at its extremity into a luminous glory, a mass of sunbeams, as if
all the sunshine of that beautiful day lay waiting for them where it had
fallen on the outskirts of the wood. Never had Paul felt so happy. That
light arm that lay on his arm, that child's step by which his own was
guided, these alone would have made life sweet and pleasant to him, no
less than this walk over the mossy turf of a green path. He would have
told the girl so, simply, as he felt it, had he not feared to alarm that
confidence which Aline placed in him, no doubt because of the sentiments
which she knew he possessed for another woman, and which seemed to hold
at a distance from them every thought of love.

Suddenly, right before them, against the bright background, a group
of persons riding on horseback came in sight, at first vague and
indistinct, then appearing as a man and a woman, handsomely mounted, and
entered the mysterious path among the bars of gold, the leafy shadows,
the thousand dots of light with which the ground was strewn, and which,
displaced by their progress as they cantered along, rose and covered
them with flowery patterns from the chests of the horses to the blue
veil of the lady rider. They came along slowly, capriciously, and the
two young people, who had drawn back into the copse, could see pass
close by them, with a clinking of bits proudly shaken and white with
foam as though after a furious gallop, two splendid animals carrying a
pair of human beings brought very near together by the narrowing of the
path; he, supporting with one arm the supple figure moulded in a dark
cloth habit; she, with a hand resting on the shoulder of her cavalier
and her s