such a shower
of falling stars, that they might have been taken for white forms
wandering among the dark trunks of the trees.

"Why have we come?" Margot asked, in a panting voice. "Do you not want
me any more, Tiennou?"

"Alas! I dare not," he replied. "Listen: you know that I was picked up
on the high road, that I have nothing in the world except my two arms,
and that Miller Fresquyl will never let his daughter marry a poor devil
like me."

She interrupted him with a painful gesture, and putting her lips to his,
she said:

"What does that matter? I love you, and I want you ... Take me ..."

And it was thus, on St. John's night, Margot Fresquyl for the first time
yielded to the mortal sin of love.

II

Did the miller guess his daughter's secret, when he heard her singing
merrily from dawn till dusk, and saw her sitting dreaming at her window
instead of sewing as she was in the habit of doing?

Did he see it when she threw ardent kisses from the tips of her fingers
to her lover at a distance?

However that might have been, he shut poor Margot in the mill as if it
had been a prison. No more love or pleasure, no more meetings at night
at the verge of the wood. When she chatted with the passers-by, when she
tried furtively to open the gate of the enclosure and to make her
escape, her father beat her as if she had been some disobedient animal,
until she fell on her knees on the floor with clasped hands, scarcely
able to move and her whole body covered with purple bruises.

She pretended to obey him, but she revolted in her whole being, and the
string of bitter insults which he heaped upon her rang in her head. With
clenched hands, and a gesture of terrible hatred, she cursed him for
standing in the way of her love, and at night, she rolled about on her
bed, bit the sheets, moaned, stretched herself out for imaginary
embraces, maddened by the sensual heat with which her body was still
palpitating. She called out Tiennou's name aloud, she broke the peaceful
stillness of the sleeping house with her heartrending sobs, and her
dejected voice drowned the monotonous sound of the water that was
dripping under the arch of the mill, between the immovable paddles of
the wheel.

III

Then there came that terrible week in October when the unfortunate young
fellows who had drawn bad numbers had to join their regiments.[11]
Tiennou was one of them, and Margot was in despair to think that she
should not see him for fiv