on. "Keep sentry, Fabien; I am
going to take a nap."

We had walked fast. It was very hot. He took off his coat, rolled it into
a pillow, and placed it beneath his head as he lay down on the grass. I
stretched myself prone on a velvety carpet of moss, and gave myself up to
a profound investigation of the one square foot of ground which lay
beneath my eyes. The number of blades of grass was prodigious. A few,
already awned, stood above their fellows, waving like palms-meadowgrass,
fescue, foxtail, brome-grass--each slender stalk crowned with a tuft.
Others were budding, only half unfolded, amid the darker mass of spongy
moss which gave them sustenance. Amid the numberless shafts thus raised
toward heaven a thousand paths crisscrossed, each full of obstacles-chips
of bark, juniper-berries, beech-nuts, tangled roots, hills raised by
burrowing insects, ravines formed by the draining off of the rains. Ants
and beetles bustled along them, pressing up hill and down to some
mysterious goal. Above them a cunning red spider was tying a blade of
grass to an orchid leaf, the pillars it had chosen for its future web;
and when the wind shook the leaves and the sun pierced through to this
spot, I saw the delicate roof already mapped out.

I do not know how long my contemplation lasted. The woods were still.
Save for a swarm of gnats which hummed in a minor key around the sleeping
Lampron, nothing stirred, not a leaf even. All nature was silent as it
drank in the full sunshine.

A murmur of distant voices stole on my ear. I rose, and crept through the
birches and hazels to the edge of the glade.

At the top of the slope, on the green margin of the glade, shaded by the
tall trees, two pedestrians were slowly advancing. At the distance they
still were I could distinguish very little except that the man wore a
frock-coat, and that the girl was dressed in gray, and was young, to
judge by the suppleness of her walk. Nevertheless I felt at once that it
was she!

I hid at they came near, and saw her pass on her father's arm, chatting
in low tones, full of joy to have escaped from the Rue de l'Universite.
She was looking before her with wide-open eyes. M. Charnot kept his eyes
on his daughter, more interested in her than in all the wealth of spring.
He kept well to the right of the path as the sun ate away the edge of the
shadows; and asked, from time to time:

"Are you tired?"

"Oh, no!"

"As soon as you are tired, my dear, we will