their very hatred of town-life. They had even planned an encampment on
the banks of the Viorne, where they were to live like savages, happy
with constant bathing, and the company of five or six books, which
would amply suffice for their wants. Even womankind was to be strictly
banished from that camp. Being very timid and awkward in the presence
of the gentler sex, they pretended to the asceticism of superior
intellects. For two years Claude had been in love with a 'prentice
hat-trimmer, whom every evening he had followed at a distance, but to
whom he had never dared to address a word. Sandoz nursed dreams of
ladies met while travelling, beautiful girls who would suddenly spring
up in some unknown wood, charm him for a whole day, and melt into air
at dusk. The only love adventure which they had ever met with still
evoked their laughter, so silly did it seem to them now. It consisted
of a series of serenades which they had given to two young ladies
during the time when they, the serenaders, had formed part of the
college band. They passed their nights beneath a window playing the
clarinet and the cornet-a-piston, and thus raising a discordant din
which frightened all the folk of the neighbourhood, until one
memorable evening the indignant parents had emptied all the water
pitchers of the family over them.

Ah! those were happy days, and how loving was the laughter with which
they recalled them. On the walls of the studio hung a series of
sketches, which Claude, it so happened, had made during a recent trip
southward. Thus it seemed as if they were surrounded by the familiar
vistas of bright blue sky overhanging a tawny country-side. Here
stretched a plain dotted with little greyish olive trees as far as a
rosy network of distant hills. There, between sunburnt russet slopes,
the exhausted Viorne was almost running dry beneath the span of an old
dust-bepowdered bridge, without a bit of green, nothing save a few