whom you give back a relish for their victuals!"

Clotilde thought with a smile of the gossip of which Martine had spoken
to her, of Father Boutin, whom they accused the doctor of having killed.
He did not kill all his patients, then; his remedy worked real miracles,
since he brought back to life the consumptive and the ataxic. And her
faith in her master returned with the warm affection for him which
welled up in her heart. When they left Lafouasse, she was once more
completely his; he could do what he willed with her.

But a few moments before, sitting on the stone bench looking at the
steam mill, a confused story had recurred to her mind; was it not here
in these smoke-blackened buildings, to-day white with flour, that a
drama of love had once been enacted? And the story came back to her;
details given by Martine; allusions made by the doctor himself; the
whole tragic love adventure of her cousin the Abbe Serge Mouret,
then rector of Les Artauds, with an adorable young girl of a wild and
passionate nature who lived at Le Paradou.

Returning by the same road Clotilde stopped, and pointing to the vast,
melancholy expanse of stubble fields, cultivated plains, and fallow
land, said:

"Master, was there not once there a large garden? Did you not tell me
some story about it?"

"Yes, yes; Le Paradou, an immense garden--woods, meadows, orchards,
parterres, fountains, and brooks that flowed into the Viorne. A garden
abandoned for an age; the garden of the Sleeping Beauty, returned to
Nature's rule. And as you see they have cut down the woods, and cleared
and leveled the ground, to divide it into lots, and sell it by auction.
The springs themselves have dried up. There is nothing there now but
that fever-breeding marsh. Ah, when I pass by here, it makes my heart
ache!"

She ventured to question him further:

"But was it not in Le Paradou that my cousin Serge and your great friend
Albine fell in love with each other?"

He had forgotten her presence. He went on talking, his gaze fixed on
space, lost in recollections of the past.

"Albine, my God! I can see her now, in the sunny garden, like a great,
fragrant bouquet, her head thrown back, her bosom swelling with joy,
happy in her flowers, with wild flowers braided among her blond tresses,
fastened at her throat, on her corsage, around her slender, bare brown
arms. And I can see her again, after she had asphyxiated herself; dead
in the midst of her flowers; very white,