"I shouldn't cry for a thing like that. But who told you I'd been crying? I got a fly in my eye. Look, only one of them's red."
But, instead of lifting her head, she bent down and began to pick the flowers at her feet.
"May I sit down beside you?"
"What a question!"
"You see, your skirt takes up all the room."
"Well then, push it away."
M. Hervart turned back the outspread skirt and sat down on the old bench—cautiously, for he knew that it was rather rickety. Now that he had money and an aristocratic name, M. Des Boys had become romantic. His whole domain, except for the kitchen garden and the rooms that were actually inhabited, was kept in a perennially wild, decrepit state. In the house and its surroundings you could see nothing but mouldering walls and rotten planks, moss—grown benches, impenetrable bramble bushes. Near the stream stood an old tower, from which the ivy fell in a cataract whose waves of greenery splashed up again to the summit of an old oak with dead forked branches—a pretty sight. The Des Boys never
