“Oh, I am so thirsty!” cried Mme. Rosemilly.

But how could she drink?  She tried to catch the water in her hand, but it slipped away between her fingers.  Jean had an idea; he placed a stone on the path and on this she knelt down to put her lips to the spring itself, which was thus on the same level.

When she raised her head, covered with myriads of tiny drops, sprinkled all over her face, her hair, her eye-lashes, and her dress, Jean bent over her and murmured:  “How pretty you look!”

She answered in the tone in which she might have scolded a child: 

“Will you be quiet?”

These were the first words of flirtation they had ever exchanged.

“Come,” said Jean, much agitated.  “Let us go on before they come up with us.”

For in fact they could see quite near them now Captain Beausire as he came down, backward, so as to give both hands to Mme. Roland; and further up, further off, Roland still letting himself slip, lowering himself on his hams and clinging on with his hands and elbows at the speed of a tortoise, Pierre keeping in front of him to watch his movements.

The path, now less steep, was here almost a road, zigzagging between the huge rocks which had at some former time rolled from the hill-top.  Mme. Rosemilly and Jean set off at a run and they were soon on the beach.  They crossed it and reached the rocks, which stretched in a long and flat expanse covered with sea-weed, and broken by endless gleaming pools.  The ebbed waters lay beyond, very far away, across this plain of slimy weed, of a black and shining olive green.

Jean rolled up his trousers above his calf, and his sleeves to his elbows, that he might get wet without caring; then saying:  “Forward!” he leaped boldly into the first tide-pool they came to.

The lady, more cautious, though fully intending to go in too, presently, made her way round the little pond, stepping timidly, for she slipped on the grassy weed.

“Do you see anything?” she asked.

“Yes, I see your face reflected in the water.”

“If that is all you see, you will not have good fishing.”

He murmured tenderly in reply: 

“Of all fishing it is that I should like best to succeed in.”

She laughed:  “Try; you will see how it will slip through your net.”

“But yet—­if you will?”

“I will see you catch prawns—­and nothing else—­for the moment.”

“You are cruel—­let us go a little farther, there are none here.”

He gave her his hand to steady her on the slippery rocks.  She leaned on him rather timidly, and he suddenly felt himself overpowered by love and insurgent with passion, as if the fever that had been incubating in him had waited till to-day to declare its presence.

They soon came to a deeper rift, in which long slender weeds, fantastically tinted, like floating green and rose-coloured hair, were swaying under the quivering water as it trickled off to the distant sea through some invisible crevice.