I hear footsteps overhead. She is coming; she had forgotten herself before her mirror, I doubt not!”

“Bénédict! do go to get your hat,” cried Athénaïs from the top of the staircase.

“Pray, go !” said Louise in an undertone, seeing that Bénédict did not stir.

“Curse the fête !” he replied in the same tone. “I must go, so be it; but as soon as I have deposited my fair cousin on the greensward, I shall take pains to have my foot trodden on and return to the farm. Will you be here, Mademoiselle Louise ?”

“No, monsieur, I shall not be here,” she replied dryly.

Bénédict’s faced flushed with indignation. He made ready to go. Madame Lhéry reappeared in a less gorgeous but even more absurd costume than her daughter’s. The satin and lace served admirably to set off the coppery tinge of her sunburned face, her strongly accentuated features and her plebeian gait. Athénaïs passed a quarter of an hour arranging her skirts, with much ill-humor, on the back seat of the carriage, reproving her mother for rumpling her sleeves by taking up too much room beside her, and regretting in her heart that the folly of her parents had not reached a point of procuring a calèche.

Père Lhéry held his hat on his knees, in order not to expose it to the risk of accident from the jolting of the vehicle by keeping it on his head. Bénédict mounted the front seat, and, as he took the reins, ventured to cast a last glance at Louise ; but he encountered such a cold, stern expression in her eyes, that he lowered his own, bit his lips, and angrily lashed the horse. Mignon started off at a gallop, and, as she struck the deep mud holes in the road, imparted to the vehicle a series of violent shocks, most disastrous to the hats of the two ladies and to Athénaïs’s temper.

III

But, after a few rods, the mare, being ill adapted by nature for racing, slackened her pace ; Bénédict’s irascible mood passed away, giving place to shame and remorse ; and Père Lhéry slept soundly.

They followed one of the little grass-grown roads called in village parlance traînes; a road so narrow that the narrow carriage touched the branches of the trees on both sides, and that Athénaïs was able to pluck a large bunch of hawthorn by passing her arm, encased in a white glove, through the side window. There are no words to describe the freshness and charm of those little tortuous paths which wind capriciously in and out under the never-failing arbors of foliage, revealing at each turn fresh depths of shadow, ever greener and more mysterious. When the noonday sun burns even to its roots the tall, dense grass of the fields, when the insects buzz noisily and the quail amorously clucks in the furrows, coolness and silence seem to take refuge in the traînes. You may walk an hour there without hearing other sounds than the flight of a blackbird alarmed by your approach, or the leap of a little green frog, gleaming like an emerald, who was sleeping in his cabin of interlaced rushes. Even yonder ditch contains a whole world of inhabitants, a whole forest of plants; its limpid water flows noiselessly over the clay, casting off its impurities, and kisses gently the watercress, balsam and hepatica on the banks; the water-moss, the long grasses called water ribbons, the hairy, hanging aquatic mosses, quiver incessantly in its silent little eddies ; the yellow wagtail runs along the sand with a mischievous yet timid air ; the clematis and the honeysuckle shade it with leafy arbors where the nightingale hides his nest. In spring it is all flowers and fragrance ; in autumn, purple sloes cover the twigs which turn white first of all in April ; the red haw, of which the thrushes are so fond, replaces the hawthorn flower, and the bramble bushes, all covered with bits of fleece left by the sheep in passing through, are tinged with purple by small wild berries pleasant to the taste.

Bénédict, allowing the placid steed’s reins to hang loosely, fell into a profound reverie. He was a young man of a strange temperament ; those who were closest to him, in default of another of the same sort to whom to liken him, considered him as being altogether outside of the common run of mankind. The majority despised him as a man incapable of doing anything useful and substantial ; and if they did not show in what slight esteem they held him, it was because they were forced to accord him the possession of true physical courage and enduring resentment. On the other hand, the Lhéry family, simple-hearted and kindly as they were, did not hesitate to accord him a place in the very highest rank in the matter of intellect and learning. Blind to his defects, those excellent people saw in their nephew simply a young man whose imagination was too fertile and his learning too extensive to allow him to enjoy repose of mind. But Bénédict, at the age of twenty-two, had not received what is called a practical education. At Paris, being possessed by love of art and of science in turn, he had become proficient in no specialty. He had worked hard, but he had stopped when practical application of what he had learned became necessary. He had become disgusted just at the moment when others reap the fruit of their labors. To him love of study ended where the necessity of adopting a profession began. Having once acquired the treasures of art and science, he was no longer spurred on by the selfish impulse to apply them to his own interests ; and as he did not know how to be useful to himself, people said when they saw him without occupation: “What is he good for ?

His cousin had been destined for him from the beginning of time; that was the best retort which could be made to those envious persons who accused the Lhérys of allowing their hearts as well as their minds to be corrupted by wealth. It cannot be denied that their common sense, the common sense of the peasant, usually so straightforward and sure, had received a rude blow in the bosom of prosperity. They had ceased to esteem the simple and modest virtues, and, after vain efforts to destroy them in themselves, they had done their utmost to stifle the germs of those virtues in their children ; but they had not ceased to love them with almost equal affection, and, while working at their ruin, they had believed that they were working for their happiness.

Such a bringing-up had proved disastrous to both. Athénaïs, like soft and flexible wax, had acquired in a boarding-school at Orleans all the faults of provincial young ladies—vanity, ambition, envy and pettiness of spirit. However, goodness of heart was in her a sort of sacred heritage transmitted by her mother, and outside influences had been unable to destroy it. Thus there was much to hope for her from the lessons of experience and the future.

The harm done was greater in the case of Bénédict.