‘Let us go back to the shade,’ begged Serge.  ’You can sit down there as you did just now, and I will lie at your feet and talk to you.’

Where they stood the sun rays fell like torrential rain.  It was as if the triumphant orb seized upon the shadowless ground, and strained it to his blazing breast.  Albine grew faint, staggered, and turned to Serge for support.

But the moment they felt each other’s touch, they fell together without even a word.  It was as though the very rock beneath them had opened, as though they were ever going down and down.  Their hands sought each other caressingly, embracingly, but such keen anguish did they experience that they suddenly tore themselves apart, and fled, each in a different direction.  Serge did not cease running till he had reached the pavilion, and had thrown himself upon his bed, his brain on fire, and despair in his heart.  Albine did not return till nightfall, after hours of weeping in a corner of the garden.  It was the first time that they had not returned home together, tired after their long wanderings.  For three days they kept apart, feeling terribly unhappy.

XIII

Yet now the park was entirely their own.  They had taken sovereign possession of it.  There was not a corner of it that was not theirs to use as they willed.  For them alone the thickets of roses put forth their blossoms, and the parterre exhaled its soft perfume, which lulled them to sleep as they lay at night with their windows open.  The orchard provided them with food, filling Albine’s skirts with fruits, and spread over them the shade of its perfumed boughs, under which it was so pleasant to breakfast in the early morning.  Away in the meadows the grass and the streams were all theirs; the grass, which extended their kingdom to such boundless distance, spreading an endless silky carpet before them; and the streams, which were the best of their joys, emblematic of their own purity and innocence, ever offering them coolness and freshness in which they delighted to bathe their youth.  The forest, too, was entirely theirs, from the mighty oaks, which ten men could not have spanned, to the slim birches which a child might have snapped; the forest, with all its trees, all its shade, all its avenues and clearings, its cavities of greenery, of which the very birds themselves were ignorant; the forest which they used as they listed, as if it were a giant canopy, beneath which they might shelter from the noontide heat their new-born love.  They reigned everywhere, even among the rocks and the springs, even over that gruesome stretch of ground that teemed with such hideous growth, and which had seemed to sink and give way beneath their feet, but which they loved yet even more than the soft grassy couches of the garden, for the strange thrill of passion they had felt there.