Albine, however, again touched him on the shoulder.  She was growing uneasy and angry.

‘Why do you not speak to me?’ she asked.  ’You can’t refuse; you will come with me?  Remember that I shall die if you refuse.  But no! you can’t; it is impossible.  We lived together once; it was vowed that we should never separate.  Twenty times, at least, did you give yourself to me.  You bade me take you wholly, your limbs, your breath, your very life itself.  I did not dream it all.  There is nothing of you that you have not given to me; not a hair in your head which is not mine.  Your hands are mine.  For days and days have I held them clasped in mine.  Your face, your lips, your eyes, your brow, all, all are mine, and I have lavished my love upon them.  Do you hear me, Serge?’

She stood erect before him, full of proud assertion, with outstretched arms.  And, in a louder voice, she repeated: 

‘Do you hear me, Serge?  You belong to me.’

Then Abbe Mouret slowly rose to his feet.  He leant against the altar, and replied: 

‘No.  You are mistaken.  I belong to God.’

He was full of serenity.  His shorn face seemed like that of some stone saint, whom no impulse of the flesh can disturb.  His cassock fell around him in straight folds like a black winding-sheet, concealing all the outlines of his body.  Albine dropped back at the sight of that sombre phantom of her former love.  She missed his freely flowing beard, his freely flowing curls.  And in the midst of his shorn locks she saw the pallid circle of his tonsure, which disquieted her as if it had been some mysterious evil, some malignant sore which had grown there, and would eat away all memory of the happy days they had spent together.  She could recognise neither his hands, once so warm with caresses, nor his lissom neck, once so sonorous with laughter; nor his agile feet, which had carried her into the recesses of the woodlands.  Could this, indeed, be the strong youth with whom she had lived one whole season—­the youth with soft down gleaming on his bare breast, with skin browned by the sun’s rays, with every limb full of vibrating life?  At this present hour he seemed fleshless; his hair had fallen away from him, and all his virility had withered within that womanish gown, which left him sexless.

‘Oh! you frighten me,’ she murmured.  ’Did you think then that I was dead, that you put on mourning?  Take off that black thing; put on a blouse.  You can tuck up the sleeves, and we will catch crayfishes again.  Your arms used to be as white as mine.’

She laid her hand on his cassock, as though to tear it off him; but he repulsed her with a gesture, without touching her.  He looked at her now and strengthened himself against temptation by never allowing his eyes to leave her.  She seemed to him to have grown taller.  She was no longer the playful damsel adorned with bunches of wild-flowers, and casting to the winds gay, gipsy laughter, nor was she the amorosa in white skirts, gracefully bending her slender form as she sauntered lingeringly beside the hedges.  Now, there was a velvety bloom upon her lips; her hips were gracefully rounded; her bosom was in full bloom.  She had become a woman, with a long oval face that seemed expressive of fruitfulness.  Life slumbered within her.  And her cheeks glowed with luscious maturity.