de her tremble as if some invisible hand were
grasping at her.

'Calm yourself,' begged Serge, 'there is no one. You are as crimson as
though you had a fever. Let us rest here for a moment. Do; I beg you.'

She had no fever at all, she said, but she wanted to get back as quickly
as possible, so that no one might laugh at her. And, ever increasing her
pace, she plucked handfuls of leaves and tendrils from the hedges, which
she entwined about her. She fastened a branch of mulberry over her hair,
twisted bindweed round her arms, and tied it to her wrists, and circled
her neck with such long sprays of laurustinus, that her bosom was hidden
as by a veil of leaves.

And that shame of hers proved contagious. Serge, who first had jested,
asking her if she were going to a ball, glanced at himself, and likewise
felt alarmed and ashamed, to a point that he also wound foliage about
his person.

Meantime, they could discover no way out of the labyrinth of bushes, but
all at once, at the end of the path, they found themselves face to face
with an obstacle, a tall, grey, grave mass of stone. It was the wall of
the Paradou.

'Come away! come away!' cried Albine.

And she sought to drag him thence; but they had not taken another twenty
steps before they again came upon the wall. They then skirted it at a
ran, panic-stricken. It stretched along, gloomy and stern, without
a break in its surface. But suddenly, at a point where it fringed a
meadow, it seemed to fall away. A great breach gaped in it, like a huge
window of light opening on to the neighbouring valley. It must have been
the very hole that Albine had one day spoken of, which she said she had
blocked up with brambles and stones. But the brambles now lay scattered
around like severed bits of rope, the stones had been thrown some
distance away, and the breach itself seemed to have been enlarged by
some furious hand.

XVII

'Ah! I felt sure of it,' cried Albine, in accents of supreme despair.
'I begged you to take me away--Serge, I beseech you, don't look through
it.'

But Serge, in spite of himself, stood rooted to the ground, on the
threshold of the breach through which he gazed. Down below, in the
depths of the valley, the setting sun cast a sheet of gold upon the
village of Les Artaud, which showed vision-like amidst the twilight in
which the neighbouring fields were already steeped. One could plainly
distinguish the houses that straggled along the high road; t