hed beside him and
breathed upon his face to make his slumber cool.

II

The fine weather broke up on the morrow, and it rained heavily.
Serge's fever returned, and he spent a day of suffering, with his eyes
despairingly fixed upon the curtains through which the light now fell
dim and ashy grey as in a cellar. He could no longer see a trace of
sunshine, and he looked in vain for the shadow that had scared him, the
shadow of that lofty bough which had disappeared amid the mist and the
pouring rain, and seemed to have carried away with it the whole forest.
Towards evening he became slightly delirious and cried out to Albine
that the sun was dead, that he could hear all the sky, all the country
bewailing the death of the sun. She had to soothe him like a child,
promising him the sun, telling him that it would come back again, that
she would give it to him. But he also grieved for the plants. The seeds,
he said, must be suffering underground, waiting for the return of light;
they had nightmares, they also dreamed that they were crawling along an
underground passage, hindered by mounds of ruins, struggling madly to
reach the sunshine. And he began to weep and sob out in low tones that
winter was a disease of the earth, and that he should die with the
earth, unless the springtide healed them both.

For three days more the weather was truly frightful. The downpour burst
over the trees with the awful clamour of an overflowing river. Gusts
of wind rolled by and beat against the windows with the violence of
enormous waves. Serge had insisted on Albine closing the shutters. By
lamplight he was no longer troubled by the gloom of the pallid curtains,
he no longer felt the greyness of the sky glide in through the smallest
chinks, and flow up to him like a cloud of dust intent on burying him.
However, increasing apathy crept upon him as he lay there with shrunken
arms and pallid features; his weakness augmented as the earth grew more
ailing. At times, when the clouds were inky black, when the bending
trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the
hair of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to
be passing away, shattered by the hurricane. But at the first gleam of
light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once
more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening
paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water. Albine now also
longed f