endless prayers.
One day when old Mme. Rougon, always on the alert, found her behind a
pillar, an hour after she had seen her there before, Martine excused
herself, blushing like a servant who had been caught idling, saying:

"I was praying for monsieur."

Meanwhile Pascal and Clotilde enlarged still more their domain, taking
longer and longer walks every day, extending them now outside the
town into the open country. One afternoon, as they were going to La
Seguiranne, they were deeply moved, passing by the melancholy fields
where the enchanted gardens of Le Paradou had formerly extended. The
vision of Albine rose before them. Pascal saw her again blooming like
the spring, in the rejuvenation which this living flower had brought
him too, feeling the pressure of this pure arm against his heart. Never
could he have believed, he who had already thought himself very old when
he used to enter this garden to give a smile to the little fairy within,
that she would have been dead for years when life, the good mother,
should bestow upon him the gift of so fresh a spring, sweetening his
declining years. And Clotilde, having felt the vision rise before them,
lifted up her face to his in a renewed longing for tenderness. She was
Albine, the eternal lover. He kissed her on the lips, and though no word
had been uttered, the level fields sown with corn and oats, where Le
Paradou had once rolled its billows of luxuriant verdure, thrilled in
sympathy.

Pascal and Clotilde were now walking along the dusty road, through the
bare and arid country. They loved this sun-scorched land, these fields
thinly planted with puny almond trees and dwarf olives, these stretches
of bare hills dotted with country houses, that showed on them like pale
patches accentuated by the dark bars of the secular cypresses. It was
like an antique landscape, one of those classic landscapes represented
in the paintings of the old schools, with harsh coloring and well
balanced and majestic lines. All the ardent sunshine of successive
summers that had parched this land flowed through their veins, and lent
them a new beauty and animation, as they walked under the sky forever
blue, glowing with the clear flame of eternal love. She, protected from
the sun by her straw hat, bloomed and luxuriated in this bath of light
like a tropical flower, while he, in his renewed youth, felt the burning
sap of the soil ascend into his veins in a flood of virile joy.

This walk to La