these parts, so does my mother. I wasn't born here, but I belong to the place. I belong to it as the trees do, as the grass and all the animals. Yes, I am a peasant woman."

She raised her head proudly.

"I come from here too," said M. Hervart.

"Yes, and you don't care for it any longer."

"I do, because it produced you and because you love it."

Delighted at the discovery of this insipidity, M. Hervart darted, hat in hand, in pursuit of a butterfly; he missed it.

"They're not so easy to catch as kisses," said Rose with a touch of irony.

M. Hervart was startled.

"Is she merely sensual?" he wondered.

But Rose was incapable of dividing her nature into categories. She felt her character as a perfect unity. Her remark had been just a conversational remark, for she was not lacking in wit.

Meanwhile, this mystery plunged M. Hervart into a prolonged meditation. He constructed the most perverse theories about the precocity of girls.

But he was soon ashamed of these mental wanderings.

"Women are complex; not more so, of course, than men, but in a different way which men can't understand. They don't understand themselves, and what's more, they don't care about understanding. They feel, and that suffices to steer them very satisfactorily through life, as well as to solve problems which leave men utterly helpless. One must act towards them as they do themselves. It's only through the feelings that one can get into contact with them. There is but one way of understanding women, and that is to love them.... Why shouldn't I say that aloud? It would amuse her, and perhaps she might find something pretty to say in reply."

But, without being exactly shy, M. Hervart was nervous about hearing the sound of his own voice. That was why he generally gave vent only to the curtest phrases. Rose had taken his hand once more. This mute language seemed to appeal to her, and M. Hervart was content to put up with it, though he found this exchange of manual confidences a little childish.

"But nothing," he went on to himself, "nothing is childish in love...."

This word, which he did not pronounce, even to himself, but which he seemed to see, as though his own hand had written it on a sheet of paper this word filled him with terror. He burst out into secret protestations:

"But there's no question of love. She doesn't love me. I don't love her. It's a mere game. This child has made me a child like herself...."

He wanted to stop thinking, but the process went on of its own accord.

"A dangerous game.... I oughtn't to have kissed her eyes. Her forehead, that's a different matter; it's fatherly.... And then letting her lean on my shoulder, like that! What's to be done?"

He had to admit that he had been the guilty party. Almost unconsciously, prompted by his mere male instinct, he had, since his arrival a fortnight before, and while still to all appearance, he continued to treat her as a child, been silently courting her. He was always looking at her, smiling to her, even though his words might be serious. Feeling herself the object of an unceasing attention, Rose had concluded that he wanted to capture her, and she had allowed herself to be caught. M. Hervart considered himself too expert in feminine psychology to admit the possibility of a young girl's having deliberately taken the first step. He felt like an absent-minded sportsman who, forgetting that he has fired, wakes up to find a partridge in his game-bag.

"An agreeable surprise," he reflected. "Almost too agreeable."

CHAPTER II

It had already grown hot. They sat down in the shade, on a tree trunk. Large harmless ants crawled hither and thither on the bark, but M. Hervart seemed to have lost his interest in entomology. Idly, they looked at the busy little creatures, crossing and recrossing one another's paths.

"Do they know what they're doing? And do I know what I'm doing? Some sensation guides them. What about me? They run here and there, because they think they've seen or smelt some prey. And I? Oh, I should like to run away from my prey. I reason, I deliberate.... Yes, I deliberate, or at least I try."

He looked up at the girl.

Rose was engaged in pulling foxglove buds off their stems and making them pop in the palm of her hand. Her face was serious. M. Hervart could look at her without distracting her from her dreams.

She made a pretty picture, as she sat there, gentle and, at the same time, wild. Her features, while they still preserved a trace of childishness, were growing marked and definite. She was a woman. How red her mouth was, how voluptuous! M. Hervart caught himself reflecting that that mouth would give most excellent kisses. What a fruit to bite, firm-fleshed and succulent! Rose heaved a sigh, and it was as though a wave had lifted her white dress; all her young bosom had seemed to expand. M. Hervart had a vision of roseate whiteness, soft and living; he desired it as a child desires the peach he sees on the wall hidden under its long leaves. He took the pleasure in this desire that he had sometimes taken in standing before Titian's Portrait of a Young Lady. The obstacle was as insurmountable: Rose, so far as he was concerned, was an illusion.

"But that makes no difference," he said to himself, "I have desired her, which isn't chaste of me. If I had been in love with her, I should not have had that kind of vision. Therefore I am not in love with her. Fortunately!"

Rose was thinking of nothing. She was just letting herself be looked at. Having been examined, she smiled gently, a smile that was faintly tinged with shyness. Flying suddenly to the opposite extreme, she burst out laughing and, holding on with both hands to the knotted trunk, leaned backwards. Her hat fell off her hair came undone. She sat up again, looking wilder than ever. M. Hervart thought that she was going to run away, like Galatea; but there was no willow tree.

"I don't care," she said as M. Hervart handed her the hat; "my hair will have to stay down. It's all right like that. Pins don't hold on my head."

"Pins," said M. Hervart, "pins rarely do hold on women's heads."

She smiled without answering and certainly without understanding. She was smiling a great deal this morning, M. Hervart thought.

"But her smile is so sweet that I should never get tired of it. Come now, I'll tell her that...."

"I love your smile. It's so sweet that I should never get tired of it."

"As sweet as that? That's because it's so new. I don't smile much generally."

It was enough to move any man to the depths of his being. M. Hervart murmured spontaneously:

"I love you, Rose."

Frankly, and without showing any surprise, she answered:

"So do I, my dear."

At the same time she shook her skirt on which a number of ants were crawling.

"This sort doesn't bite," she said. "They're nice...."

"Like you." (What a compliment! How insipid! What a fool I'm making of myself!)

"There's one on your sleeve," said Rose. She brushed it off.

"Now say thank you," and she presented her cheek, on which M. Hervart printed the most fraternal of kisses.

"It's incomprehensible," he thought. "However, I don't think she's in love. If she were, she would run away. It is only after the decisive act that love becomes familiar...."

"If we want to go to Cherbourg," said Rose, "we must have lunch early."

They moved away; soon they were out of the wood and had entered the hardly less unkempt garden. It was sunny there, and they crossed it quickly. She walked ahead. M. Hervart picked a rose as he went along and presented it to her. Rose took it and picked another, which she gave to M. Hervart, saying:

"This one's me."

M. Hervart had to begin pondering again. He was feeling happy, but understood less and less.

"She behaves as though she were in love with me.... She also behaves as though she weren't. At one moment one