He was well aware that he needed no fever medicine, and that his fever did not come from the swamps.

She said no more about the drug, but as they stood on the landing and he was preparing to descend, she said:

“Suppose we go out on the terrace?”

Livette wished to prolong the tÊte-À-tÊte, to ascertain if, after her prayer, she would find her Renaud in him once more.

He placed his lamp on the floor at the top of the staircase, and, pushing open the door just above the last step, they both stood on the terrace that overlooks the whole chÂteau.

A square terrace, and in the centre the great bell lay upon its side in its iron cage—the great bell, three feet in diameter, that in the old days called to work as well as to prayer, and when it rang the Angelus caused the fever-haunted farm-laborers to fall upon their knees on the brink of the miasmatic bogs. Both of them, one after the other, mechanically struck the bell with their foot, as it lay there on its side. It gave forth a short, plaintive note, quickly stifled by contact with the flag-stones. It was like the sigh of a mystery-haunted soul.

With hearts as sad as the bell, they leaned on the stone parapet in presence of the night.

Livette and Renaud loved each other, but affection was no longer enough for him. The sap of the spring-time, boiling in his veins in lustful desire, gave birth, in Livette’s heart, to sweet flowers of reverie.

The swarming of the stars above their heads was beyond comprehension. They were as many as the gadflies and frogs in the desert, or the waves of the sea. They seemed to open and half close, like flowers in a meadow, waved to and fro by a light, quickly-passing breath, like eyelids making signs.

They seemed to have something to say, to move like lips speaking a living language, telling of something of great moment that must be known at once—but no sound coming from them reaches the ears of men, for human hearing is not keen enough. Nor is the human sight keen enough to see that the dust of the Milky-Way (pale as the pollen of flowers) is also made of stars. Though men have seen it with a different sight, afforded by man’s inventive genius, that sight is powerless to pierce farther and deeper—to learn all there is to know. Moreover,—and Renaud himself had heard the story from the shepherds who pass the winter in Camargue and Crau, and spend their nights in summer counting the stars upon the summits of the Alps,—there are, in space, beyond the skies visible to our eyes, fires alight so far away from us, so far away that their light, now on its way toward our earth, will not reach us for centuries to come. The men who follow us centuries hence will see twinkling stars that even in our day were lighted and making signs we could not see. And in those days ideas, which are already kindled in men’s minds, and are seen to-day by none save those in whom their light is shed, will shine for all, and one of them will be, for every mortal, the love and pity of the world.

Certain it is, that neither Renaud nor Livette could fathom those infinite depths; but from the vast expanse of heaven, swarming with tiny lights, a nameless emotion stole into their hearts, made up of all their hopes to come.

Future worlds, lovelier than this of ours, were dreaming in them, with them.

In them, too, because they were young and human, there was a share in the future. In them, too, was the responsibility for future lives. In them, too, lurked the mystery of generations to be born, for whom a single couple, surviving the wreck of the demolished world, would be enough to bestow upon them the desire to live and the power. A spark is the basis of all fire. A man and a woman are the basis of all love. Infinity is no greater than the number two. And that is why the great scholars, who figure like BarrÊme, know no more of life and the heart than Livette and Renaud—who knew nothing at all.

They knew naught save that they were alive and that they wished to love each other and that they sought and shunned each other at the same moment—but they did not ask each other why. They said nothing. They felt. They could not say to each other that rivalry and jealousy, that is to say grief, serve the designs of nature, whose purpose doubtless is, by arousing those emotions, to quicken desire, so that creation may be assured by outbursts of passion, and the future of mankind by the imperious need of pleasure.

What does the law care for the weak and the vanquished? the strong alone, they say, it wishes to perpetuate.

Pity and justice are human inventions, and will never triumph until they have been slowly assimilated by the human mind to the matter of which it is made.

They suffered, they longed for happiness—beneath that mystery-laden spring sky. They awaited the coming of their joy, they summoned their every hope, and they gazed at the dark horizon, at the desert, where the tracts of sand shone like mirrors among the dark reeds, and the ponds glistening with salt between the black lines of tamarisks. They gazed upon the boundless expanse in which they seemed lost, and where, nevertheless, they felt that they alone were an epitome of everything; they listened, without hearing them, to the unending noises of the island,—the murmuring of the water, the rustling of the reeds, the waving foliage, the growling of wandering beasts, the distant roaring of two rolling rivers and a restless sea;—and this combined voice of the whole island formed a fitting accompaniment, by reason of the extent and number of the sounds that composed it, to the silent twinkling of the stars, that no one hears.

There was in the park, invisible to them at that hour, a foreign tree, on which the flowers could be seen, by daylight, opening with a slight noise. They sometimes amused themselves by watching that tree, said to have come from Syria. A slight report, as if muffled, and a tiny cloud, of very powerful odor, would issue from the bursting cell. The tree continued, during the night, to send out its dust of passions in quest of prey, and its strange perfume was wafted upward to the lovers.

They trembled with joy at the slightest contact with each other. Ah! if she could but have given him, on that beautiful May evening, all the love his lusty youth demanded; if he could but have felt her clinging lips melt beneath his burning ones, upon that lofty terrace overlooking the rounded tops of the huge trees in the park, beneath that dark star-spangled sky, doubtless his little betrothed would have remained sole mistress of his heart!

But there were too many obstacles between Livette and Renaud; and as he struggled virtuously to keep away from her, his thoughts flew off to the other.

And Livette was already conscious of the heartache of the deserted lover. All the broad expanse of level country that her eyes knew so well, and that she felt about her in the darkness, suddenly seemed empty to her, a desert in very truth, and thereby to resemble her own heart. And softly, silently, she began to weep,—whereupon one of the great farm dogs, her favorite, who had been seeking her in every direction, came up to her and licked her hand as it hung at her side.

And down yonder, far down above the dark line of the sea, Renaud, meanwhile, fancied that he saw a naked woman’s form emerge from the water, and await his coming, suspended in mid-air, or standing on the surface of the waves.

“Livette! Livette!”

It was the grandmother’s voice calling.

They went down without exchanging a word.

“Good-night, Monsieur Jacques,” said the maiden.

“Good-night, mademoiselle,” Renaud replied.

So they called each other monsieur and mademoiselle that night, and, a moment after they had parted, Renaud took his horse from the stable in perfect silence, and rode away. His heart did not tell him that Livette, at her window, watched him depart, her eyes filled with tears.

“Where is he going?”

She followed for a moment with her glance the luminous point (the reflection of a star upon the head of the drover’s spear) dancing about in the darkness among the trees like a will-o’-the-wisp,—and when that spark went out, she no longer saw the stars.