e
upon his back and lightly bounding across with her to the other side.
Yet there the apple-trees and the pear-trees were still laden with
fruit, and the vines, now with scantier foliage, bent beneath the weight
of their gleaming clusters, each grape freckled by the sun's caress.
Ah! how they had gambolled beneath the appetising shade of those ancient
trees! What merry children had they then been! Albine smiled as she
thought of how she had clambered up into the cherry-tree that had broken
down beneath her. He, Serge, must at least remember what a quantity of
plums they had eaten. He only answered by a nod. He already seemed quite
weary. The orchard, with its green depths and chaos of mossy trunks,
disquieted him and suggested to his mind some dark, dank spot, teeming
with snakes and nettles.

Then she led him to the meadow-lands, where he had to take a few steps
amongst the grass. It reached to his shoulders now, and seemed to him
like a swarm of clinging arms that tried to bind his limbs and pull him
down and drown him beneath an endless sea of greenery. He begged Albine
to go no further. She was walking on in front, and at first she did not
stop; but when she saw how distressed he appeared, she halted and
came back and stood beside him. She also was growing gradually more
low-spirited, and at last she shuddered like himself. Still she went on
talking. With a sweeping gesture she pointed out to him the streams,
the rows of willows, the grassy expanse stretching far away towards
the horizon. All that had formerly been theirs. For whole days they had
lived there. Over yonder, between those three willows by the water's
edge, they had played at being lovers. And they would then have been
delighted if the grass had been taller than themselves so that they
might have lost themselves in its depths, and have been the more
secluded, like larks nesting at the bottom of a field of corn. Why,
then, did he tremble so to-day, when the tip of his foot just sank into
the grass?

Then she led him to the forest. But the huge trees seemed to inspire
Serge with still greater dread. He did not know them again, so sternly
solemn seemed their bare black trunks. Here, more than anywhere else,
amidst those austere columns, through which the light now freely
streamed, the past seemed quite dead. The first rains had washed the
traces of their footsteps from the sandy paths, the winds had swept
every other lingering memorial into the underbrus