They often questioned each other about the remains which they discovered.  Miette, after a woman’s fashion, was partial to lugubrious subjects.  At each new discovery she launched into endless suppositions.  If the bone were small, she spoke of some beautiful girl a prey to consumption, or carried off by fever on the eve of her marriage; if the bone were large, she pictured some big old man, a soldier or a judge, some one who had inspired others with terror.  For a long time the tombstone particularly engaged their attention.  One fine moonlight night Miette distinguished some half-obliterated letters on one side of it, and thereupon she made Silvere scrape the moss away with his knife.  Then they read the mutilated inscription:  “Here lieth . . .  Marie . . . died . . .”  And Miette, finding her own name on the stone, was quite terror-stricken.  Silvere called her a “big baby,” but she could not restrain her tears.  She had received a stab in the heart, she said; she would soon die, and that stone was meant for her.  The young man himself felt alarmed.  However, he succeeded in shaming the child out of these thoughts.  What! she so courageous, to dream about such trifles!  They ended by laughing.  Then they avoided speaking of it again.  But in melancholy moments, when the cloudy sky saddened the pathway, Miette could not help thinking of that dead one, that unknown Marie, whose tomb had so long facilitated their meetings.  The poor girl’s bones were perhaps still lying there.  And at this thought Miette one evening had a strange whim, and asked Silvere to turn the stone over to see what might be under it.  He refused, as though it were sacrilege, and his refusal strengthened Miette’s fancies with regard to the dear phantom which bore her name.  She positively insisted that the girl had died young, as she was, and in the very midst of her love.  She even began to pity the stone, that stone which she climbed so nimbly, and on which they had sat so often, a stone which death had chilled, and which their love had warmed again.

“You’ll see, this tombstone will bring us misfortune,” she added.  “If you were to die, I should come and lie here, and then I should like to have this stone set over my body.”

At this, Silvere, choking with emotion, scolded her for thinking of such mournful things.

And so, for nearly two years, their love grew alike in the narrow pathway and the open country.  Their idyll passed through the chilling rains of December and the burning solicitations of July, free from all touch of impurity, ever retaining the sweet charm of some old Greek love-tale, all the naive hesitancy of youth which desires but knows not.  In vain did the long-departed dead whisper in their ears.  They carried nothing away from the old cemetery but emotional melancholy and a vague presentiment of a short life.  A voice seemed to whisper to them that they would depart amidst their virginal love, long ere the bridal day would give them wholly to each other.  It was there, on the tombstone and among the bones that lay hidden beneath the rank grass, that they had first come to indulge in that longing for death, that eager desire to sleep together in the earth, that now set them stammering and sighing beside the Orcheres road, on that December night, while the two bells repeated their mournful warnings to one another.