However, money having become scarce towards the latter days of July, he was obliged to go to Paris to sell Papa Malgras half a dozen of his old studies, and Christine, on accompanying him to the station, made him solemnly promise that he would go to see Sandoz.  In the evening she was there again, at the Bonnieres Station, waiting for him.

‘Well, did you see him? did you embrace each other?’

He began walking by her side in silent embarrassment.  Then he answered in a husky voice: 

‘No; I hadn’t time.’

Thereupon, sorely distressed, with two big tears welling to her eyes, she replied: 

‘You grieve me very much indeed.’

Then, as they were walking under the trees, he kissed her, crying also, and begging her not to make him sadder still.  ’Could people alter life?  Did it not suffice that they were happy together?’

During the earlier months they only once met some strangers.  This occurred a little above Bennecourt, in the direction of La Roche-Guyon.  They were strolling along a deserted, wooded lane, one of those delightful dingle paths of the region, when, at a turning, they came upon three middle-class people out for a walk—­father, mother, and daughter.  It precisely happened that, believing themselves to be quite alone, Claude and Christine had passed their arms round each other’s waists; she, bending towards him, was offering her lips; while he laughingly protruded his; and their surprise was so sudden that they did not change their attitude, but, still clasped together, advanced at the same slow pace.  The amazed family remained transfixed against one of the side banks, the father stout and apoplectic, the mother as thin as a knife-blade, and the daughter, a mere shadow, looking like a sick bird moulting—­all three of them ugly, moreover, and but scantily provided with the vitiated blood of their race.  They looked disgraceful amidst the throbbing life of nature, beneath the glorious sun.  And all at once the sorry girl, who with stupefied eyes thus watched love passing by, was pushed off by her father, dragged along by her mother, both beside themselves, exasperated by the sight of that embrace, and asking whether there was no longer any country police, while, still without hurrying, the lovers went off triumphantly in their glory.

Claude, however, was wondering and searching his memory.  Where had he previously seen those heads, so typical of bourgeois degeneracy, those flattened, crabbed faces reeking of millions earned at the expense of the poor?  It was assuredly in some important circumstance of his life.  And all at once he remembered; they were the Margaillans, the man was that building contractor whom Dubuche had promenaded through the Salon of the Rejected, and who had laughed in front of his picture with the roaring laugh of a fool.  A couple of hundred steps further on, as he and Christine emerged from the lane and found themselves in front of a large estate, where a big white building stood, girt with fine trees, they learnt from an old peasant woman that La Richaudiere, as it was called, had belonged to the Margaillans for three years past.  They had paid fifteen hundred thousand francs for it, and had just spent more than a million in improvements.