about robbers.  However, when they had regained their feet, and stood grouped around the vault, released from their mourning duties, their cheeks became pink again; it must all be untrue, those stories could only have been told for fun.  The spot seemed pleasant, so pretty with its long grass; what capital games they might have had at hide-and-seek behind all the tombstones!  Their little feet were already itching to dance away, and their white dresses fluttered like wings.  Amidst the graveyard stillness the warm sunshine lazily streamed down, flushing their faces.  Lucien had thrust his hand beneath Marguerite’s veil, and was feeling her hair and asking if she put anything on it, to make it so yellow.  The little one drew herself up, and he told her that they would marry each other some day.  To this Marguerite had no objection, but she was afraid that he might pull her hair.  His hands were still wandering over it; it seemed to him as soft as highly-glazed letter-paper.

“Don’t go so far away,” called Pauline.

“Well, we’ll leave now,” said Madame Deberle.  “There’s nothing more to be done, and the children must be hungry.”

The little girls, who had scattered like some boarding-school at play, had to be marshalled together once more.  They were counted, and baby Guiraud was missing; but she was at last seen in the distance, gravely toddling along a path with her mother’s parasol.  The ladies then turned towards the gateway, driving the stream of white dresses before them.  Madame Berthier congratulated Pauline on her marriage, which was to take place during the following month.  Madame Deberle informed them that she was setting out in three days’ time for Naples, with her husband and Lucien.  The crowd now quickly disappeared; Zephyrin and Rosalie were the last to remain.  Then in their turn they went off, linked together, arm-in-arm, delighted with their outing, although their hearts were heavy with grief.  Their pace was slow, and for a moment longer they could be seen at the end of the path, with the sunshine dancing over them.

“Come,” murmured Monsieur Rambaud to Helene.

With a gesture she entreated him to wait.  She was alone, and to her it seemed as though a page had been torn from the book of her life.  As soon as the last of the mourners had disappeared, she knelt before the tomb with a painful effort.  Abbe Jouve, robed in his surplice, had not yet risen to his feet.  Both prayed for a long time.  Then, without speaking, but with a glowing glance of loving-kindness and pardon, the priest assisted her to rise.

“Give her your arm,” he said to Monsieur Rambaud.

Towards the horizon stretched Paris, all golden in the radiance of that spring morning.  In the cemetery a chaffinch was singing.

CHAPTER XXV.

Two years were past and gone.  One morning in December the little cemetery lay slumbering in the intense cold.  Since the evening before snow had been falling, a fine snow, which a north wind blew before it.  From the paling sky the flakes now fell at rarer intervals, light and buoyant, like feathers.  The snow was already hardening, and a thick trimming of seeming swan’s-down edged the parapet of the terrace.  Beyond this white line lay Paris, against the gloomy grey on the horizon.