‘No, no,’ he said gently.  ’It is wrong of me.  I don’t want to know.  I would rather see it myself.’

Then he would relapse into his favourite dream of all the greenery which he could feel only a step away.  For several days he lived on that dream alone.  At first, he said, he had perceived the garden much more distinctly.  As he gained strength, the surging blood that warmed his veins seemed to blur his dreamy imaginings.  His uncertainties multiplied.  He could no longer tell whether the trees were on the right, whether the water flowed at the bottom of the garden, or whether some great rocks were not piled below his windows.  He talked softly of all this to himself.  On the slightest indication he would rear wondrous plans, which the song of a bird, the creaking of a bough, the scent of a flower, would suddenly make him modify, impelling him to plant a thicket of lilac in one spot, and in another to place flower-beds where formerly there had been a lawn.  Every hour he designed some new garden, much to the amusement of Albine, who, whenever she surprised him at it, would exclaim with a burst of laughter:  ’That’s not it, I assure you.  You can’t have any idea of it.  It’s more beautiful than all the beautiful things you ever saw.  So don’t go racking your head about it.  The garden’s mine, and I will give it to you.  Be easy, it won’t run away.’

Serge, who had already been so afraid of the light, felt considerable trepidation when he found himself strong enough to go and rest his elbows on the window-sill.  Every evening he once more repeated, ‘To-morrow,’ and ‘To-morrow.’  He would turn away in his bed with a shudder when Albine came in, and would cry out that she smelt of hawthorn, that she had scratched her hands in burrowing a hole through a hedge to bring him all its odour.  One morning, however, she suddenly took him up in her arms, and almost carrying him to the window, held him there and forced him to look out and see.

‘What a coward you are!’ she exclaimed with her fine ringing laugh.

And waving one hand all round the landscape, she repeated with an air of triumph, full of tender promise:  ‘The Paradou!  The Paradou!’

Serge looked out upon it, speechless.

IV

A sea of verdure, in front, to right, to left, everywhere.  A sea rolling its surging billows of leaves as far as the horizon, unhindered by house, or screen of wall, or dusty road.  A desert, virgin, hallowed sea, displaying its wild sweetness in the innocence of solitude.  The sun alone came thither, weltering in the meadows in a sheet of gold, threading the paths with the frolicsome scamper of its beams, letting its fine-spun, flaming locks droop through the trees, sipping from the springs with amber lips that thrilled the water.  Beneath that flaming dust the vast garden ran riot like some delighted beast let loose at the world’s very end, far from everything and free from everything.  So prodigal was the luxuriance of foliage, so overflowing the tide of herbage, that from end to end it all seemed hidden, flooded, submerged.  Nought could be seen but slopes of green, stems springing up like fountains, billowy masses, woodland curtains closely drawn, mantles of creepers trailing over the ground, and flights of giant boughs swooping down upon every side.