Serge shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.  ‘What would be the use?’ he said.  ’Is it not pleasant in the parterre?  Don’t you think we ought to remain among the flowers, instead of seeking a greater happiness that lies so far away?’

‘It is there that the dead lady lies buried,’ murmured Albine, falling back into her reverie.  ’It was the joy of being there that killed her.  The tree casts a shade, whose charm is deathly. . . .  I would willingly die so.  We would clasp one another there, and we would die, and none would ever find us again.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ interrupted Serge.  ’You make me feel so unhappy.  I would rather that we should live in the bright sunlight, far away from that fatal shade.  Your words distress me, as though they urged us to some irreparable misfortune.  It must be forbidden to sit beneath a tree whose shade can thus affect one.’

‘Yes,’ Albine gravely declared, ’it is forbidden.  All the folks of the countryside have told me that it is forbidden.’

Then silence fell.  Serge rose from the couch where he had been lolling, and laughed, and pretended that he did not care about stories.  The sun was setting, however, before Albine would consent to go into the garden for even a few minutes.  She led Serge to the left, along the enclosing wall, to a spot strewn with fragments of stone, and woodwork, and ironwork, bristling too with briars and brambles.  It was the site of the old mansion, still black with traces of the fire which had destroyed the building.  Underneath the briars lay rotting timbers and fire-split masonry.  The spot was like a little ravined, hillocky wilderness of sterile rocks, draped with rude vegetation, clinging creepers that twined and twisted through every crevice like green serpents.  The young folks amused themselves by wandering across this chaos, groping about in the holes, turning over the debris, trying to reconstruct something of the past out of the ruins before them.  They did not confess their curiosity as they chased one another through the midst of fallen floorings and overturned partitions; but they were indeed, all the time, secretly pondering over the legend of those ruins, and of that lady, lovelier than day, whose silken skirt had rustled down those steps, where now lizards alone were idly crawling.

Serge ended by climbing the highest of the ruinous masses; and, looking round at the park which unfolded its vast expanse of greenery, he sought the grey form of the pavilion through the trees.  Albine was standing silent by his side, serious once more.

‘The pavilion is yonder, to the right,’ she said at last, without waiting for Serge to ask her.  ’It is the only one of the buildings that is left.  You can see it quite plainly at the end of that grove of lime-trees.’

They fell into silence again; and then Albine, as though pursuing aloud the reflections which were passing through their minds, exclaimed:  ’When he went to see her, he must have gone down yonder path, then past those big chestnut trees, and then under the limes.  It wouldn’t take him a quarter of an hour.’