h other?'

He began walking by her side in silent embarrassment. Then he answered
in a husky voice:

'No; I hadn't time.'

Thereupon, sorely distressed, with two big tears welling to her eyes,
she replied:

'You grieve me very much indeed.'

Then, as they were walking under the trees, he kissed her, crying also,
and begging her not to make him sadder still. 'Could people alter life?
Did it not suffice that they were happy together?'

During the earlier months they only once met some strangers. This
occurred a little above Bennecourt, in the direction of La Roche-Guyon.
They were strolling along a deserted, wooded lane, one of those
delightful dingle paths of the region, when, at a turning, they came
upon three middle-class people out for a walk--father, mother, and
daughter. It precisely happened that, believing themselves to be quite
alone, Claude and Christine had passed their arms round each other's
waists; she, bending towards him, was offering her lips; while he
laughingly protruded his; and their surprise was so sudden that they did
not change their attitude, but, still clasped together, advanced at the
same slow pace. The amazed family remained transfixed against one of
the side banks, the father stout and apoplectic, the mother as thin as
a knife-blade, and the daughter, a mere shadow, looking like a sick bird
moulting--all three of them ugly, moreover, and but scantily provided
with the vitiated blood of their race. They looked disgraceful amidst
the throbbing life of nature, beneath the glorious sun. And all at once
the sorry girl, who with stupefied eyes thus watched love passing by,
was pushed off by her father, dragged along by her mother, both beside
themselves, exasperated by the sight of that embrace, and asking whether
there was no longer any country police, while, still without hurrying,
the lovers went off triumphantly in their glory.

Claude, however, was wondering and searching his memory. Where had he
previously seen those heads, so typical of bourgeois degeneracy, those
flattened, crabbed faces reeking of millions earned at the expense of
the poor? It was assuredly in some important circumstance of his life.
And all at once he remembered; they were the Margaillans, the man was
that building contractor whom Dubuche had promenaded through the Salon
of the Rejected, and who had laughed in front of his picture with the
roaring laugh of a fool. A couple of hundred steps further on, as he and
C