lue bells of campanulae swayed aloft, some of them even over the
tall asphodels, whose golden stems served as their steeples. In one
corner was a giant fennel that reminded one of a lace-dressed lady
spreading out a sunshade of sea-green satin. Then the pair suddenly
found their way blocked. It was impossible to advance any further;
a mass of flowers, a huge sheaf of plants stopped all progress. Down
below, a mass of brank-ursine formed as it were a pedestal, from the
midst of which sprang scarlet geum, rhodanthe with stiff petals, and
clarkia with great white carved crosses, that looked like the insignia
of some barbarous order. Higher up still, bloomed the rosy viscaria,
the yellow leptosiphon, the white colinsia, and the lagurus, whose dusty
green bloom contrasted with the glowing colours around it. Towering over
all these growths scarlet foxgloves and blue lupins, rising in slender
columns, formed a sort of oriental rotunda gleaming vividly with crimson
and azure; while at the very summit, like a surmounting dome of dusky
copper, were the ruddy leaves of a colossal castor-bean.

As Serge reached out his hands to try to force a passage, Albine stopped
him and begged him not to injure the flowers. 'You will break the stems
and crush the leaves,' she said. 'Ever since I have been here, I have
always taken care to hurt none of them. Come, and I will show you the
pansies.'

She made him turn and led him from the narrow paths to the centre of the
parterre, where, once upon a time, great basins had been hollowed
out. But these had now fallen into ruin, and were nothing but gigantic
_jardinieres_, fringed with stained and cracked marble. In one of the
largest of them, the wind had sown a wonderful basketful of pansies.
The velvety blooms seemed almost like living faces, with bands of violet
hair, yellow eyes, paler tinted mouths, and chins of a delicate flesh
colour.

When I was younger they used to make me quite afraid,' murmured Albine.
'Look at them. Wouldn't you think that they were thousands of little
faces looking up at you from the ground? And they turn, too, all in
the same direction. They might be a lot of buried dolls thrusting their
heads out of the ground.'

She led him still further on. They went the round of all the other
basins. In the next one a number of amaranthuses had sprung up, raising
monstrous crests which Albine had always shrunk from touching, such was
their resemblance to big bleeding caterpill