pe, both rugged and smiling in its wildness, hardly conveyed
the idea of silence, but rather of profound meditation, absolute calm;
the calmness of solitude, the religious meditation induced by spacious
forest depths. The woods seemed asleep, and the low murmurings,
which from time to time escaped from their recesses, seemed like the
unconscious sighs exhaled by a dreamer. The very odor peculiar to trees
in autumn, the penetrating and spicy odor of the dying leaves, had a
delicate and subtle aroma harmonizing with this quietude of fairyland.

Now and then, through the vaporous golden atmosphere of the late autumn
sunset, through the pensive stillness of the hushed woods, the distant
sound of feminine voices, calling to one another, echoed from the hills,
and beyond the hedges was heard the crackling of branches, snapped by
invisible hands, and the rattle of nuts dropping on the earth. It was
the noise made by the gatherers of beechnuts, for in the years when
the beech produces abundantly, this harvest, under the sanction of the
guardians of the forest, draws together the whole population of women
and children, who collect these triangular nuts, from which an excellent
species of oil is procured.

Wending his way along the copse, Claudet suddenly perceived, through
an opening in the trees, several large white sheets spread under the
beeches, and covered with brown heaps of the fallen fruit. One or two
familiar voices hailed him as he passed, but he was not disposed to
gossip, for the moment, and turned abruptly into the bushwood, so as to
avoid any encounter. The unexpected event which had just taken place,
and which was to change his present mode of life, as well as his plans
for the future, was of too recent occurrence for him to view it with any
degree of calmness.

He was like a man who has received a violent blow on the head, and is
for the moment stunned by it. He suffered vaguely, without seeking to
know from what cause; he had not been able as yet to realize the extent
of his misfortune; and every now and then a vague hope came over him
that all would come right.

So on he went, straight ahead, his eyes on the ground, and his hands in
his pockets, until he emerged upon one of the old forest roads where the
grass had begun to burst through the stony interstices; and there, in
the distance, under the light tracery of weaving branches, a delicate
female silhouette was outlined on the dark background. A young woma