perfumes and flowers on the paths, and displaying everywhere its marvellous
adornments of universal life,--labour and love. The children were already
tumbling about in the foot-paths, the birds were warbling in the hawthorn
hedges, and in the moist grass the grasshopper was saluting the rising sun.

And he, in the midst of all this joy and all this life, was walking on with
his head filled with vague ideas of suicide. A few peasants passed near him
and sainted him: he saw them not; he saw not the children who stopped still
and gazed in bewilderment at his strange appearance: he saw not Suzanne who
was approaching at the end of the path.

She was only a few paces away when he raised his head, and all his blood
rushed to his heart. Vision blessed and cursed at the same time. She, she
there, at the vary moment of the consummation of his shame. She before him
when he had just dug an abyss between them. What should he say? Would she
not read on his troubled face the shameful secret of the drama within? Was
not his crime written on his sullied brow in indelible soars? He would have
wished the earth to open under his feet.

Meanwhile she advanced blushing, perhaps as greatly agitated as himself.

And from the smile on her rosy lips, from the brightness of her dark eyes,
from the gram of her carriage, from the chaste swelling of her bosom, from
the folds of her dress which, blown by the morning breeze, revealed the
harmonious outlines of her fairy leg, from all those inexpressible maiden
charms, there breathed forth that _something_, for which there is no name
in the language of men, but which accelerates the beating of the heart,
which pours into the veins an unknown fluid, and bids us murmur low to the
stranger who passes by, and whom perhaps we may never see again: "My life
is thine, is thine!"

Mysterious sensation, which, in the golden days of youth, we have all
experienced once at least with ravishing delight.

And everything seemed to say to Marcel: "Fool! If thou hadst wished it, we
were thine. The delights of paradise were thine, and thou hast preferred
the impurities of hell!"

Oh, if he had been able, if he had dared, he would have cast himself at
this maiden's feet, he would have kissed her knees, he would have grovelled
on the ground and cried with tears: "Pardon! pardon! Fate has caused it
all. Almighty God will never pardon me, but it is thou whom I implore, and
what matters it, if thou, thou dost pardon me