Serge sat down in a chair, a little distance away, and began to talk of other matters.  But they remained uneasy.  They seemed to think that all those painted figures were gazing at them.  It was as if the trooping cupids were springing out of the panelling, casting the flowers they held around them, and threatening to bind them together with the blue ribbons which already enchained two lovers in one corner of the ceiling.  And the whole story of the nymph and her faun lover, from his first peep at her to his triumph among the flowers, seemed to burst into warm life.  Were all those lovers, all those impudent shameless cupids about to step down from their panels and crowd around them?  They already seemed to hear their panting sighs, and to feel their breath filling the spacious room with the perfume of voluptuousness.

‘It’s quite suffocating, isn’t it?’ sighed Albine.  ’In spite of every airing I have given it, the room has always seemed close to me!

‘The other night,’ said Serge, ’I was awakened by such a penetrating perfume, that I called out to you, thinking you had come into the room.  It was just like the soft warmth of your hair when you have decked it with heliotropes. . . .  In the earlier times it seemed to be wafted to me from a distance, it was like the lingering memory of a perfume; but now I can’t sleep for it, and it is so strong and penetrating that it quite stupefies me.  The alcove grows so hot, too, at night that I shall be obliged to lie on the couch.’

Albine laid her fingers on her lips, and whispered, ’It is the dead girl—­she who once lived here.’

They sniffed the odorous air with forced gaiety, but in reality feeling very troubled.  Certainly never before had the room exhaled such a disquieting aroma.  The very walls seemed to be still echoing the faint rustling of perfumed skirts; and the floor had retained the fragrance of satin slippers dropped by the bedside, and near the head of the bed itself Serge thought he could trace the imprint of a little hand, which had left behind it a clinging scent of violets.  Over all the furniture the phantom presence of the dead girl still lingered fragrantly.

‘See, this is the armchair where she used to sit,’ cried Albine; ’there is the scent of her shoulders at the back of it yet.’

She sat down in it herself, and bade Serge drop upon his knees and kiss her hand.

’You remember the day when I first let you in and said, “Good morrow, my dear lord!” But that wasn’t all, was it?  He kissed her hands when the door was closed.  There they are, my hands.  They are yours.’

Then they tried to resume their old frolics in order that they might forget the Paradou, whose joyous murmur they heard ever rising outside, and that they might no longer think of the pictures nor yield to the languor-breathing influence of the room.  Albine put on an affected manner, leant back in her chair, and finally laughed at the foolish figure which Serge made at her feet.