Then she gave a jump and scampered off without waiting for him, and they both walked along the margin of the first stream which barred their onward course.  It was a shallow tranquil brook between banks of wild cress.  It flowed on so placidly and gently that its surface reflected like a mirror the smallest reed that grew beside it.  Albine and Serge followed this stream, whose onward motion was slower than their own, for a long time before they came across a tree that flung a long shadow upon the idle waters.  As far as their eyes could reach they saw the bare brook stretch out and slumber in the sunlight like a blue serpent half uncoiled.  At last they reached a clump of three willows.  Two had their roots in the stream; the third was set a little backward.  Their trunks, rotten and crumbling with age, were crowned with the bright foliage of youth.  The shadow they cast was so slight as scarcely to be perceptible upon the sunlit bank.  Yet here the water, which, both above and below, was so unruffled, showed a transient quiver, a rippling of its surface, as though it were surprised to find even this light veil cast over it.  Between the three willows the meadow-land sloped down to the stream, and some crimson poppies had sprung up in the crevices of the decaying old trunks.  The foliage of the willows looked like a tent of greenery fixed upon three stakes by the water’s edge, beside a rolling prairie.

‘This is the place,’ cried Albine, ‘this is the place;’ and she glided beneath the willows.

Serge sat down by her side, his feet almost in the water.  He glanced round him, and murmured:  ’You know everything, you know all the best spots.  One might almost think this was an island, ten feet square, right in the middle of the sea.’

‘Yes, indeed, we are quite at home,’ she replied, as she gleefully drummed the grass with her fists.  ’It is altogether our own, and we are going to do everything ourselves.’  Then, as if struck by a brilliant idea, she sprang towards him, and, with her face close to his, asked him joyously:  ‘Will you be my husband?  I will be your wife.’

He was delighted at the notion, and replied that he would gladly be her husband, laughing even more loudly than she had done herself.  Then Albine suddenly became grave, and assumed the anxious air of a housewife.

‘You know,’ she said, ’that it is I who will have to give the orders.  We will have breakfast as soon as you have laid the table.’

She gave him her orders in an imperious fashion.  He had to stow all the various articles which she extracted from her pockets into a hole in one of the willows, which bole she called the cupboard.  The rags supplied the household linen, while the comb represented the toilette necessaries.  The needles and string were to be used for mending the explorers’ clothes.  Provision for the inner man consisted of the little bottle of wine and a few crusts which she had saved from yesterday.  She had, to be sure, some matches, by the aid of which she intended to cook the fish they were going to catch.