no sense of shame.  They remained in the river quite an hour, splashing and throwing water into each other’s faces; Miette now getting cross, now breaking out into laughter, while Silvere gave her her first lesson, dipping her head under every now and again so as to accustom her to the water.  As long as he held her up she threw her arms and legs about violently, thinking she was swimming; but directly he let her go, she cried and struggled, striking the water with her outstretched hands, clutching at anything she could get hold of, the young man’s waist or one of his wrists.  She leant against him for an instant, resting, out of breath and dripping with water; and then she cried:  “Once more; but you do it on purpose, you don’t hold me.”

At the end of a fortnight, the girl was able to swim.  With her limbs moving freely, rocked by the stream, playing with it, she yielded form and spirit alike to its soft motion, to the silence of the heavens, and the dreaminess of the melancholy banks.  As she and Silvere swam noiselessly along, she seemed to see the foliage of both banks thicken and hang over them, draping them round as with a huge curtain.  When the moon shone, its rays glided between the trunks of the trees, and phantoms seemed to flit along the river-side in white robes.  Miette felt no nervousness, however, only an indefinable emotion as she followed the play of the shadows.  As she went onward with slower motion, the calm water, which the moon converted into a bright mirror, rippled at her approach like a silver-broidered cloth; eddies widened and lost themselves amid the shadows of the banks, under the hanging willow branches, whence issued weird, plashing sounds.  At every stroke she perceived recesses full of sound; dark cavities which she hastened to pass by; clusters and rows of trees, whose sombre masses were continually changing form, stretching forward and apparently following her from the summit of the bank.  And when she threw herself on her back, the depths of the heavens affected her still more.  From the fields, from the distant horizon, which she could no longer see, a solemn lingering strain, composed of all the sighs of the night, was wafted to her.

She was not of a dreamy nature; it was physically, through the medium of each of her senses, that she derived enjoyment from the sky, the river, and the play of light and shadow.  The river, in particular, bore her along with endless caresses.  When she swam against the current she was delighted to feel the stream flow rapidly against her bosom and limbs.  She dipped herself in it yet more deeply, with the water reaching to her lips, so that it might pass over her shoulders, and envelop her, from chin to feet, with flying kisses.  Then she would float, languid and quiescent, on the surface, whilst the ripples glided softly between her costume and her skin.  And she would also roll over in the still pools like a cat on a carpet; and swim from the luminous patches where the moonbeams were bathing, to the dark water shaded by the foliage, shivering the while, as though she had quitted a sunny plain and then felt the cold from the boughs falling on her neck.