what may happen. I must be serious, cold; I must try and look tired and antique...."

As soon as she heard her mother's footsteps in the room above the drawing-room, Rose came and sat down close to M. Hervart, put her hands on the arm of his chair. He looked at her, and there was something of madness in his eyes. He turned completely and laid his hands upon the girl's hands. They moved, took his and pressed them, gently. Then, without having had the time to think of what they were doing, they woke up a second later mouth against mouth. This kiss exhausted their emotion. With the same instinctive movement both drew back, but they went on looking at one another.

Decidedly, she was very pretty. She, for part, found him admirable, thinking:

"I belong to him. I have given him my lips. I am his. What will he do? What shall I do?..."

That was just what M. Hervart was wondering—what ought he to do?

"What caresses are possible, what won't she object to? I should like to kiss her lips again.... Her eyes? Her neck? Which of the Italian poets was it who said: 'Kiss the arms, the neck, the breasts of your beloved, they will not give you back your kisses. The lips alone,' But I shall have to say something. Of course, I ought to say: 'Je vous aime.' But I don't love her. If I did, I should have said: 'Je t'aime!' and I should have said it without thinking, without knowing.

"Rose, I love you."

She shut her eyes, laid her head on the arm of the chair; for she was sitting on a low stool.

It was the ear that presented itself. M. Hervart kissed her ear slowly, savouring it, kiss by kiss, like an epicure over some choice shell-fish.

"She lets me do what I like. It's amusing...."

He kissed his way round her ear and halted next to the eye, which was shut.

"How soft her eyelid is!"

His lips travelled down her nose and settled at the corner of her mouth. Tickled by their touch, she smiled.

When he had thoroughly kissed the right side, she offered him the left; then, giving her lips to him frankly, she received his kiss, returned it with all her heart, and got up.

She smiled without any embarrassment. She was happy and very little disturbed.

"There," she said to herself. "Now I'm married."

CHAPTER VI

The paths were now visible. One of them, in front of the house, made an oval round a lawn, which looked, at the moment, like a patch of weeds, with all sorts of flowers in the uneven grass—buttercups, moon-daisies, cranes-bill and centaury; there were rushes, too, and nettles, hemlock and plants of lingwort that looked like long thin girls in white hats.

Encoignard, the gardener from Valognes, was contemplating this wildness with a melancholy eye:

"It will have to be ploughed, M. Des Boys, or at least well hoed. Then we'll sift the earth we've broken up, level it down and sow ray-grass. In two years it will be like a carpet of green velvet."

Eyeing the landscape, he went on:

"Lime trees! You ought to have a segoya here and over there an araucaria. And what's that? An apple-tree. That's quite wrong. We'll have that up and put a magnolia grandiflora there. You want an English garden, don't you? An English garden oughtn't to contain anything but exotic plants. Lilacs and roses.... Why not snow-ball trees? Ah, there's a nice spotted holly. We might use that perhaps."

"I don't want anyone to touch my trees," said Rose, who had drawn near.

"She's right," said M. Des Boys.

"Think of pulling up lilacs," Rose went on, "pulling up rose-trees."

"But I mean to put prettier flowers in their place, Mademoiselle."

"The prettiest flowers are the ones I like best."

She picked a red rose and put it to her lips, kissing it as though it were something sacred and adored.

M. Des Boys looked at his daughter with astonishment.

"Well, M. Encoignard, we must do what she wants. Hervart, what do you think about it?"

"I think that one ought to leave nature as unkempt as possible. I also think that one ought to love the plants of the country where one lives. They are the only ones that harmonise with the sky and the crops, with the colour of the rivers and roads and roofs."

"Quite right," said M. Des Boys.

"Xavier, I love you," Rose whispered, taking M. Hervart's arm.

The inspection of the garden was continued, and it was decided that M. Encoignard's collaboration should be reduced to the ordinary functions of a plain docile gardener. One or two new plants were admitted on condition that the old should be respected.

M. Hervart had got up early and had been strolling about the garden for some time past. He had spent half the night in thought. All the women he had loved or known had visited his memory with their customary gestures and the attitudes they affected. There was that other one who seemed always to have come merely to pay a friendly call; it needed real diplomacy to obtain from her what, at the bottom of her heart, she really desired. Between these two extremes there were many gradations. Most of them liked to give themselves little by little, playing their desire against their sense of shame M. Hervart flattered himself that he knew all about women; he knew that who let herself be touched will let herself be wholly possessed.

"A woman," he said to himself, "who has been as familiar as Rose has been, or even much less familiar, ought to be one who has surrendered herself. Perhaps she might make me wait a few days more, but she would belong to me, she would let her eyes confess it and her lips would speak it out. Such a woman would even be disposed to hasten the coming of the delightful moment, if I had not the wit to prepare it myself. Rose, being a young girl and having only the dimmest presentiments of the truth, does not know how to hasten our happiness; otherwise she most certainly would hasten it. She belongs, then, to me. The question to be answered is this: shall I go on smelling the rose on the tree, or shall I pluck it?"

The poetical quality of this metaphor seemed to him perhaps a little flabby. He began to speak to himself, without actually articulating the words, even in a whisper, in more precise terms.

"Well, then, if I take her, I shall keep her. I have never thought of marrying, but it's no good going against the current of one's life. It may be happiness. Shall I lay up this regret for my old age: happiness passed dose to me, smiling to my desire, and my eyes remained dull and my mouth dumb? Happiness? Is it certain? Happiness is always uncertain. Unhappiness too. And the fusing of these two elements makes a dull insipid mixture."

This commonplace idea occupied him for a while. Every joy is transient, and when it has passed one finds oneself numb and neutral once again.

"Neutral, or below neutral? A woman of this temperament? I can still tame her? Yes, but what will happen ten years hence, when she is thirty? Ah, well, till then...!"

M. Des Boys carried off Encoignard into his study. Left alone, Rose and M. Hervart had soon vanished behind the trees and shrubberies, had soon crossed the stream. They almost ran.

"Here we are at home," said Rose and, very calmly, she offered her lips to M. Hervart.

"She's positively conjugal already," thought M. Hervart.

Nevertheless, this kiss disturbed his equanimity—the more so since Rose, in gratitude no doubt to M. Hervart for his defence of her old garden, kept her mouth a long time pressed to his. She was growing breathless and her breasts rose under her thin white blouse. M. Hervart was tempted to touch them. He made bold, and his gesture was received without indignation. They looked at one another anxious to speak but finding no words. Their mouths came together once more. M. Hervart pressed Rose's breast, and a small hand squeezed his other hand. It was a perilous moment. Realising this, M. Hervart tried to put an end to the contact. But the little hand squeezed his own more tightly and in