Serge, recognising that she was unwilling to reply, had ceased to question her; and, when she now entered his room, he contented himself with casting an anxious glance at her, fearful lest some evening she should no longer have strength enough to come to him.  Where could she thus reduce herself to such exhaustion?  What perpetual struggle was it that brought about those alternations of joy and despair?  One morning he started at the sound of a light footfall beneath his window.  It could not be a roe venturing abroad in that manner.  Moreover he could recognise that light footfall.  Albine was wandering about the Paradou without him.  It was from the Paradou that she returned to him with all those hopes and fears and inward wrestlings, all that lassitude which was killing her.  And he could well guess what she was seeking out there, alone in the woody depths, with all the silent obstinacy of a woman who has vowed to effect her purpose.  After that he used to listen for her steps.  He dared not draw aside the curtain and watch her as she hurried along through the trees; but he experienced strange, almost painful emotion, in listening to ascertain what direction she took, whether she turned to right or to left, whether she went straight on through the flower-beds, and how far her ramble extended.  Amidst all the noisy life of the Paradou, amidst the soughing chorus of the trees, the rustling of the streams, and the ceaseless songs of the birds, he could distinguish the gentle pit-pat of her shoes so plainly that he could have told whether she was stepping over the gravel near the rivers, the crumbling mould of the forest, or the bare ledges of the rocks.  In time he even learned to tell, from the sound of her nervous footfall, whether she came back hopeful or depressed.  As soon as he heard her step on the staircase, he hurried from the window, and he never let her know that he had thus followed her from afar in her wanderings.  But she must have guessed it, for with a glance she always afterwards told him where she had been.

‘Stay indoors, and don’t go out,’ he begged her, with clasped hands, one morning when he saw her still unrecovered from the fatigue of the previous day.  ‘You drive me to despair.’

But she hastened away in irritation.  The garden, now that it rang with Albine’s footfalls, seemed to have a more depressing influence than ever upon Serge.  The pit-pat of her feet was yet another voice that called him; an imperious voice that echoed ever more and more loudly within him.  He closed his ears and tried to shut out the sound, but the distant footsteps still echoed to him in the throbbings of his heart.  And when she came back, in the evening, it was the whole park that came back with her, with the memories of their walks together, and of the slow dawn of their love, in the midst of conniving nature.  She seemed to have grown taller and graver, mellowed, matured by her solitary rambles.  There was nothing left in her of the frolicsome child, and his teeth would suddenly set at times when he looked at her and beheld her so desirable.