scents in the air.  Then there are the lime-trees, the wild cherry, and the hedges red with strawberries—­it is intoxicating.  And, whatever you may say, Monsieur de Buxieres, I assure you that the beauty of the forest is not a thing to be despised.  Every season it is renewed:  in autumn, when the wild fruits and tinted leaves contribute their wealth of color; in winter, with its vast carpets of snow, from which the tall ash springs to such a stately height-look, now! up there!”

They were in the depths of the forest.  Before them were colonnades of slim, graceful trees, rising in one unbroken line toward the skies, their slender branches forming a dark network overhead, and their lofty proportions lessening in the distance, until lost in the solemn gloom beyond.  A religious silence prevailed, broken only by the occasional chirp of the wren, or the soft pattering of some smaller fourfooted race.

“How beautiful!” exclaimed Reine, with animation; “one might imagine one’s self in a cathedral!  Oh! how I love the forest; a feeling of awe and devotion comes over me, and makes me want to kneel down and pray!”

Julien looked at her with an uneasy kind of admiration.  She was walking slowly now, grave and thoughtful, as if in church.  Her white hood had fallen on her shoulders, and her hair, slightly stirred by the wind, floated like a dark aureole around her pale face.  Her luminous eyes gleamed between the double fringes of her eyelids, and her mobile nostrils quivered with suppressed emotion.  As she passed along, the brambles from the wayside, intermixed with ivy, and other hardy plants, caught on the hem of her dress and formed a verdant train, giving her the appearance of the high-priestess of some mysterious temple of Nature.  At this moment, she identified herself so perfectly with her nickname, “queen of the woods,” that Julien, already powerfully affected by her peculiar and striking style of beauty, began to experience a superstitious dread of her influence.  His Catholic scruples, or the remembrance of certain pious lectures administered in his childhood, rendered him distrustful, and he reproached himself for the interest he took in the conversation of this seductive creature.  He recalled the legends of temptations to which the Evil One used to subject the anchorites of old, by causing to appear before them the attractive but illusive forms of the heathen deities.  He wondered whether he were not becoming the sport of the same baleful influence; if, like the Lamias and Dryads of antiquity, this queen of the woods were not some spirit of the elements, incarnated in human form and sent to him for the purpose of dragging his soul down to perdition.