ystal; the drooping, urn-shaped roses let it drip drop by drop; the
round, cabbage-like roses exhaled it with the even breath of slumbering
flowers; while the budding roses tightly locked their petals and only
sent forth as yet the faint sigh of maidenhood.

'I love you, I love you,' softly repeated Serge.

Albine, too, was a large rose, a pallid rose that had opened since the
morning. Her feet were white, her arms were rosy pink, her neck was fair
of skin, her throat bewitchingly veined, pale and exquisite. She was
fragrant, she proffered lips which offered as in a coral cup a perfume
that was yet faint and cool. Serge inhaled that perfume, and pressed her
to his breast. Albine laughed.

The ring of that laugh, which sounded like a bird's rhythmic notes,
enraptured Serge.

'What, that lovely song is yours?' he said. 'It is the sweetest I ever
heard. You are indeed my joy.'

Then she laughed yet more sonorously, pouring forth rippling scales of
high-pitched, flute-like notes that melted into deeper ones. It was an
endless laugh, a long-drawn cooing, then a burst of triumphant music
celebrating the delight of awakening love. And everything--the roses,
the fragrant wood, the whole of the Paradou--laughed in that laugh of
woman just born to beauty and to love. Till now the vast garden had
lacked one charm--a winning voice which should prove the living mirth
of the trees, the streams, and the sunlight. Now the vast garden was
endowed with that charm of laughter.

'How old are you?' asked Albine, when her song had ended in a faint
expiring note.

'Nearly twenty-six,' Serge answered.

She was amazed. What! he was twenty-six! He, too, was astonished at
having made that answer so glibly, for it seemed to him that he had not
yet lived a day--an hour.

'And how old are you?' he asked in his turn.

'Oh, I am sixteen.'

Then she broke into laughter again, quivering from head to foot,
repeating and singing her age. She laughed at her sixteen years with a
fine-drawn laugh that flowed on with rhythmic trilling like a streamlet.
Serge scanned her closely, amazed at the laughing life that transfigured
her face. He scarcely knew her now with those dimples in her cheeks,
those bow-shaped lips between which peeped the rosy moistness of her
mouth, and those eyes blue like bits of sky kindling with the rising of
the sun. As she threw back her head, she sent a glow of warmth through
him.

He put out his hand, and fumbled mecha