"I don't recognize you in your present state. You fraternize with Corancez, you the irreconcilable! You, the master of Chaméane, love these paltry gardens, with their lawns that they turn up in spring, with their colored metallic trees and with their imitation verdure!--I prefer that." And he pointed, as he spoke, to the turning of the road, where the mountain showed itself covered with a fleece of dark pines and light larch trees. At its foot the line of villas from Cannes to Golfe Juan continued for a little distance and then ceased, leaving nothing upon the mountain side right up to the peak but a growth of primitive forest. To the right spread the sea, deserted, unbroken by even a single sail. The sense of isolation was so complete that for a moment, glancing from the verdant mountain to the shimmering sea, the illusion of what the landscape must have been before it had become a fashionable wintering-place was startlingly complete. The two young men walked on for a few hundred yards further and plunged into mid-forest. The red trunks of the pines were now growing so thickly around them that the azure brilliancy of the waves could only be seen fitfully. The black foliage above their heads was outlined against the open sky with singular distinctness. The refreshing, penetrating odor of resin, mingled at intervals with the delicate perfume of a large, flowing mimosa, enveloped them in a balmy atmosphere. Olivier surveyed the forest with its northern aspect with all the pleasure of a traveller returning from the East, tired of sandy horizons, weary of that monotonous, implacably burnished nature, and who feels a keen joy at the sight of a variegated vegetation and in the multitudinous colors of the European landscape. Hautefeuille, for his part, looked at Olivier. Disquieted to the verge of anxiety by the enigma of a marriage that he had formerly accepted without remark, he began to study the changing shades of thought, grave and gay, that flitted across his friend's candid physiognomy. Olivier was plainly more at ease in the absence of his wife. But he retained the expression of scorn in his eyes and the bitter curve on his lips that his friend knew so well. These signs were the invariable forerunners of one of those acrimonious fits of which Madame de Carlsberg had told Madame Brion. Pierre had always suffered for his friend when these crises attacked Olivier, and when he began to speak about himself and about life in a tone of cruel scorn that disclosed an abnormal state of cynical disillusion, he suffered doubly to-day; for his heart was unusually sensitive by reason of the love that filled it. What would his suffering have been could he have understood the entire significance of the remarks in which his companion's melancholy sought relief!