ough she was right willing to die she would fain
have known life first. At last, growing calmer, she gently rested her
head on the young man's shoulder, without uttering a word. Silvere
kissed her again. She tasted those kisses slowly, seeking their meaning,
their hidden sweetness. As she felt them course through her veins,
she interrogated them, asking if they were all love, all passion. But
languor at last overcame her, and she fell into gentle slumber. Silvere
had enveloped her in her pelisse, drawing the skirt around himself at
the same time. They no longer felt cold. The young man rejoiced to find,
from the regularity of her breathing, that the girl was now asleep;
this repose would enable them to proceed on their way with spirit. He
resolved to let her slumber for an hour. The sky was still black, and
the approach of day was but faintly indicated by a whitish line in the
east. Behind the lovers there must have been a pine wood whose musical
awakening it was that the young man heard amidst the morning breezes.
And meantime the wailing of the bells grew more sonorous in the
quivering atmosphere, lulling Miette's slumber even as it had
accompanied her passionate fever.

Until that troublous night, these young people had lived through one
of those innocent idylls that blossom among the toiling masses, those
outcasts and folks of simple mind amidst whom one may yet occasionally
find amours as primitive as those of the ancient Greek romances.

Miette had been scarcely nine years old at the time when her father was
sent to the galleys for shooting a gendarme. The trial of Chantegreil
had remained a memorable case in the province. The poacher boldly
confessed that he had killed the gendarme, but he swore that the latter
had been taking aim at him. "I only anticipated him," he said, "I
defended myself; it was a duel, not a murder." He never desisted from
this line of argument. The presiding Judge of the Assizes could not make
him understand that, although a gendarme has the right to fire upon a
poacher, a poacher has no right to fire upon a gendarme. Chantegreil
escaped the guillotine, owing to his obviously sincere belief in his own
innocence, and his previous good character. The man wept like a child
when his daughter was brought to him prior to his departure for Toulon.
The little thing, who had lost her mother in her infancy, dwelt at this
time with her grandfather at Chavanoz, a village in the passes of the
Seille. W