ear the mansion was
destroyed by fire, the park doors were nailed up, the very loopholes of
the walls were filled with mould; and thus, since that remote time, not
a glance had penetrated that vast enclosure which covered the whole of
one of the plateaux of the Garrigue hills.

'There can be no lack of nettles there,' laughingly said Abbe Mouret.
'Don't you find that the whole wall reeks of damp, uncle?'

A pause followed, and he asked:

'And whom does the Paradou belong to now?'

'Why, nobody knows,' the doctor answered. 'The owner did come here once,
some twenty years ago. But he was so scared by the sight of this
adders' nest that he has never turned up since. The real master is the
caretaker, that old oddity, Jeanbernat, who has managed to find quarters
in a lodge where the stones still hang together. There it is, see--that
grey building yonder, with its windows all smothered in ivy.'

The gig passed by a lordly iron gate, ruddy with rust, and lined inside
with a layer of boards. The wide dry throats were black with brambles. A
hundred yards further on was the lodge inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood
within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently
blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden
by the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back
turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that
stretched away behind him.

The young priest jumped down, looking inquisitively around him and
questioning the doctor, who was hurriedly fastening the horse to a ring
fixed in the wall.

'And the old man lives all alone in this out-of-the-way hole?' he asked.

'Yes, quite alone,' replied his uncle, adding, however, the next minute:
'Well, he has with him a niece whom he had to take in, a queer girl,
a regular savage. But we must make haste. The whole place looks
death-like.'

VIII

The house with its shutters closed seemed wrapped in slumber as it stood
there in the midday sun, amidst the hum of the big flies that swarmed
all up the ivy to the roof tiles. The sunlit ruin was steeped in happy
quietude. When the doctor had opened the gate of the narrow garden,
which was enclosed by a lofty quickset hedge, there, in the shadow cast
by a wall, they found Jeanbernat, tall and erect, and calmly smoking his
pipe, as in the deep silence he watched his vegetables grow.

'What, are you up then, you humbug?' exclaimed the astonished docto