He caught hold of her hands, and exclaimed in a voice quivering with admiration:  ‘How beautiful you are!’

In the falling dust of sunshine Albine’s skin looked milky white, scarce gilded here and there by the sunny sheen.  The shower of roses around and on her steeped her in pinkness.

Her fair hair, loosely held together by her comb, decked her head as with a setting planet whose last bright sparks shone upon the nape of her neck.  She wore a white gown; her arms, her throat, her stainless skin bloomed unabashed as a flower, musky with a goodly fragrance.  Her figure was slender, not too tall, but supple as a snake’s, with softly rounded, voluptuously expanding outlines, in which the freshness of childhood mingled with womanhood’s nascent charms.  Her oval face, with its narrow brow and rather full mouth, beamed with the tender living light of her blue eyes.  And yet she was grave, too, her cheeks unruffled, her chin plump—­as naturally lovely as are the trees.

‘And how I love you!’ said Serge, drawing her to himself.

They were wholly one another’s now, clasped in each other’s arms!  They did not kiss, but held each other round the waist, cheek to cheek, united, dumb, delighted with their oneness.  Around them bloomed the roses with a mad, amorous blossoming, full of crimson and rosy and white laughter.  The living, opening flowers seemed to bare their very bosoms.  Yellow roses were there showing the golden skin of barbarian maidens:  straw-coloured roses, lemon-coloured roses, sun-coloured roses—­every shade of the necks which are ambered by glowing skies.  Then there was skin of softer hue:  among the tea roses, bewitchingly moist and cool, one caught glimpses of modest, bashful charms, with skin as fine as silk tinged faintly with a blue network of veins.  Farther on all the smiling life of the rose expanded:  there was the blush white rose, barely tinged with a dash of carmine, snowy as the foot of a maid dabbling in a spring; there was the silvery pink, more subdued than even the glow with which a youthful arm irradiates a wide sleeve; there was the clear, fresh rose, in which blood seemed to gleam under satin as in the bare shoulders of a woman bathed in light; and there was the bright pink rose with its buds like the nipples of virgin bosoms, and its opening flowers that suggested parted lips, exhaling warm and perfumed breath.  And the climbing roses, the tall cluster roses with their showers of white flowers, clothed all these others with the lacework of their bunches, the innocence of their flimsy muslin; while, here and there, roses dark as the lees of wine, sanguineous, almost black, showed amidst the bridal purity like passion’s wounds.  Verily, it was like a bridal—­the bridal of the fragrant wood, the virginity of May led to the fertility of July and August; the first unknowing kiss culled like a nosegay on the wedding morn.  Even in the grass, moss roses, clad in close-fitting garments of green wool, seemed to be awaiting the advent