who remained standing and motionless against the door. "Adieu,
Mademoiselle!"

He turned away abruptly; plunged into the first avenue he came to, lost
his way twice and finally reached the courtyard, and thence escaped at
breakneck speed across the fields.

Reine maintained her statue-like pose as long as the young man's
footsteps resounded on the stony paths; but when they died gradually away
in the distance, when nothing could be heard save the monotonous trill of
the grasshoppers basking in the sun, she threw herself down on the green
heap of rubbish; she covered her face with her hands and gave way to a
passionate outburst of tears and sobs.

In the meanwhile, Julien de Buxieres, angry with himself, irritated by
the speedy success of his mission, was losing his way among the
pasturages, and getting entangled in the thickets. All the details of
the interview presented themselves before his mind with remorseless
clearness. He seemed more lonely, more unfortunate, more disgusted with
himself and with all else than he ever had been before. Ashamed of the
wretched part he had just been enacting, he felt almost childish
repugnance to returning to Vivey, and tried to pick out the paths that
would take him there by the longest way. But he was not sufficiently
accustomed to laying out a route for himself, and when he thought he had
a league farther to go, and had just leaped over an intervening hedge,
the pointed roofs of the chateau appeared before him at a distance of not
more than a hundred feet, and at one of the windows on the first floor he
could distinguish Claudet, leaning for ward, as if to interrogate him.

He remembered then the promise he had made the young huntsman; and