But Serge no longer felt frightened.  He was being born anew in the sunshine, in that pure bath of light which streamed upon him.  He was being born anew at five-and-twenty, his senses hurriedly unclosing, enraptured with the mighty sky, the joyful earth, the prodigy of loveliness spread out around him.  This garden, which he knew not only the day before, now afforded him boundless delight.  Everything filled him with ecstasy, even the blades of grass, the pebbles in the paths, the invisible puffs of air that flitted over his cheeks.  His whole body entered into possession of this stretch of nature; he embraced it with his limbs, he drank it in with his lips, he inhaled it with his nostrils, he carried it in his ears and hid it in the depths of his eyes.  It was his own.  The roses of the flower garden, the lofty boughs of the forest, the resounding rocks of the waterfall, the meadows which the sun planted with blades of light, were his.  Then he closed his eyes and slowly reopened them that he might enjoy the dazzle of a second wakening.

‘The birds have eaten all the strawberries,’ said Albine disconsolately, as she ran up to him.  ‘See, I have only been able to find these two!’

But she stopped short a few steps away, heart-struck and gazing at Serge with rapturous astonishment.  ‘How handsome you are!’ she cried.

She drew a little nearer; then stood there, absorbed in her contemplation, and murmuring:  ‘I had never, never seen you before.’

He had certainly grown taller.  Clothed in a loose garment, he stood erect, still somewhat slender, with finely moulded limbs, square chest, and rounded shoulders.  His head, slightly thrown back, was poised upon a flexible and snowy neck, rimmed with brown behind.  Health and strength and power were on his face.  He did not smile, his expression was that of repose, with grave and tender mouth, firm cheeks, large nose, and grey, clear, commanding eyes.  The long locks that thickly covered his head fell upon his shoulders in jetty curls; while a slender growth of hair, through which gleamed his white skin, curled upon his upper lip and chin.

‘Oh! how handsome, how handsome you are!’ lingeringly repeated Albine, crouching at his feet and gazing up at him with loving eyes.  ’But why are you sulking with me?  Why don’t you speak to me?’

Still he stood there and made no answer.  His eyes were far away; he never even saw that child at his feet.  He spoke to himself in the sunlight, and said:  ‘How good the light is!’

That utterance sounded like a vibration of the sunlight itself.  It fell amid the silence in the faintest of whispers like a musical sigh, a quiver of warmth and of life.  For several days Albine had never heard his voice, and now, like himself, it had altered.  It seemed to her to course through the park more sweetly than the melody of birds, more imperiously than the wind that bends the boughs.  It reigned, it ruled.  The whole garden heard it, though it had been but a faint and passing breath, and the whole garden was thrilled with the joyousness it brought.