“Abomination of abomination!” murmured Marcel, and he went out in haste; he would not remain another minute in that cursed house.  It seemed to him that the walls of his room reeked of debauchery, and that everything there was impregnated with the odour of foul orgies.

He went out of the village, unconscious of his road, like a hunted criminal; he tried to escape from himself, for that harsh officer, remorse, had laid vigorous hold of his conscience.  Be followed at random the foot-paths, lined by gardens by which he had passed so many times with placid brow and a clean heart; he walked on, he walked on, with bare head, and blank and haggard eyes, thinking of nothing but his crime, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, not oven the bell which summoned him to his morning Mass, as it cheerfully filled the air with its silver notes.

The morning was as bright as the face of a bride.  May was shedding its 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!”