winter.  And how he was moved with loving gratitude!  Had it been within his power, he would have spared Albine’s tiny feet even the roughness of the paths; he dreamed of carrying her, clinging round his neck, like a child lulled to sleep by her mother.  He already watched over her with a guardian’s watchful care, thrusting aside the stones and brambles, jealous lest the breeze should waft a fleeting kiss upon those darling locks which were his alone.  She on her side nestled against his shoulder and serenely yielded to his guidance.

Thus Albine and Serge strolled on together in the sunlight for the first time.  A balmy fragrance floated in their wake, the very path on which the sun had unrolled a golden carpet thrilled with delight under their feet.  Between the tall flowering shrubs they passed like a vision of such wondrous charm that the distant paths seemed to entreat their presence and hail them with a murmur of admiration, even as crowds hail long-expected sovereigns.  They formed one sole, supremely lovely being.  Albine’s snowy skin was but the whiteness of Serge’s browner skin.  And slowly they passed along clothed with sunlight—­nay, they were themselves the sun—­worshipped by the low bending flowers.

A tide of emotion now stirred the Paradou to its depths.  The old flower garden escorted them—­that vast field bearing a century’s untrammelled growth, that nook of Paradise sown by the breeze with the choicest flowers.  The blissful peace of the Paradou, slumbering in the broad sunlight, prevented the degeneration of species.  It could boast of a temperature ever equable, and a soil which every plant had long enriched to thrive therein in the silence of its vigour.  Its vegetation was mighty, magnificent, luxuriantly untended, full of erratic growths decked with monstrous blossoming, unknown to the spade and watering-pot of gardeners.  Nature left to herself, free to grow as she listed, in the depths of that solitude protected by natural shelters, threw restraint aside more heartily at each return of spring, indulged in mighty gambols, delighted in offering herself at all seasons strange nosegays not meant for any hand to pluck.  A rabid fury seemed to impel her to overthrow whatever the effort of man had created; she rebelliously cast a straggling multitude of flowers over the paths, attacked the rockeries with an ever-rising tide of moss, and knotted round the necks of marble statues the flexible cords of creepers with which she threw them down; she shattered the stonework of the fountains, steps, and terraces with shrubs which burst through them; she slowly, creepingly, spread over the smallest cultivated plots, moulding them to her fancy, and planting on them, as ensign of rebellion, some wayside spore, some lowly weed which she transformed into a gigantic growth of verdure.  In days gone by the parterre, tended by a master passionately fond of flowers, had displayed in its trim beds and borders a wondrous wealth of choice blossoms.  And the same plants could still be found; but perpetuated, grown into such numberless families, and scampering in such mad fashion throughout the whole garden, that the place was now all helter-skelter riot to its very walls, a very den of debauchery, where intoxicated nature had hiccups of verbena and pinks.