scanty leaves and fluttering blooms, that looked like butterflies’ wings of sulphur hue splashed with soft lake.  The blue bells of campanulae swayed aloft, some of them even over the tall asphodels, whose golden stems served as their steeples.  In one corner was a giant fennel that reminded one of a lace-dressed lady spreading out a sunshade of sea-green satin.  Then the pair suddenly found their way blocked.  It was impossible to advance any further; a mass of flowers, a huge sheaf of plants stopped all progress.  Down below, a mass of brank-ursine formed as it were a pedestal, from the midst of which sprang scarlet geum, rhodanthe with stiff petals, and clarkia with great white carved crosses, that looked like the insignia of some barbarous order.  Higher up still, bloomed the rosy viscaria, the yellow leptosiphon, the white colinsia, and the lagurus, whose dusty green bloom contrasted with the glowing colours around it.  Towering over all these growths scarlet foxgloves and blue lupins, rising in slender columns, formed a sort of oriental rotunda gleaming vividly with crimson and azure; while at the very summit, like a surmounting dome of dusky copper, were the ruddy leaves of a colossal castor-bean.

As Serge reached out his hands to try to force a passage, Albine stopped him and begged him not to injure the flowers.  ’You will break the stems and crush the leaves,’ she said.  ’Ever since I have been here, I have always taken care to hurt none of them.  Come, and I will show you the pansies.’

She made him turn and led him from the narrow paths to the centre of the parterre, where, once upon a time, great basins had been hollowed out.  But these had now fallen into ruin, and were nothing but gigantic jardinieres, fringed with stained and cracked marble.  In one of the largest of them, the wind had sown a wonderful basketful of pansies.  The velvety blooms seemed almost like living faces, with bands of violet hair, yellow eyes, paler tinted mouths, and chins of a delicate flesh colour.

When I was younger they used to make me quite afraid,’ murmured Albine.  ’Look at them.  Wouldn’t you think that they were thousands of little faces looking up at you from the ground?  And they turn, too, all in the same direction.  They might be a lot of buried dolls thrusting their heads out of the ground.’

She led him still further on.  They went the round of all the other basins.  In the next one a number of amaranthuses had sprung up, raising monstrous crests which Albine had always shrunk from touching, such was their resemblance to big bleeding caterpillars.  Balsams of all colours, now straw-coloured, now the hue of peach-blossom, now blush-white, now grey like flax, filled another basin where their seed pods split with little snaps.  Then in the midst of a ruined fountain, there flourished a colony of splendid carnations.  White ones hung over the moss-covered rims, and flaked ones thrust a bright medley of blossom between the