Meanwhile, M. Des Boys forgot his painting and stayed in the garden nearly the whole morning. Rose was annoyed. She had counted on repeating their yesterday's walk among the hollies and brambles, among the foxgloves and through the bracken. She dreamed of how she would take this walk every day of her life, believing that she would find it eternally the same, as moving and as novel. M. Hervart, though he was grateful for this diversion, could not help feeling certain regrets. He missed Rose's hand within his own. For a moment, as they were walking along the terrace, they found themselves alone, at the very spot where the crisis had begun. Quickly, they took one another's hands and Rose offered her cheek. M. Hervart made no attempt, on this occasion, to obtain a better kiss. It was not the occasion. Perhaps he did not even think of it. Rose was disappointed. M. Hervart noticed it and lifted the girl's hands to his lips. He loved this caress, having a special cult for hands. He gave utterance to his secret thought, saying: "How is it that I never yet kissed your hands?" Pleased, without being moved, Rose confined herself to smiling. Then, suddenly, as an idea flashed through her mind, the smile broke into a laugh, which, for all its violence, seemed somehow tinged with shyness. Grown calmer, she asked. "I'd like to know ... to know.... I'd like to know your name." M. Hervart was nonplussed. "My name? But ... Ah, I see ... the other one." He hesitated. This name, the sound of which he had hardly heard since his mother's death, was so unfamiliar to him that he felt a certain embarrassment at uttering it. He signed himself simply "Hervart." All his friends railed him by this name, for none had known him in the intimacy of the family; even his mistresses had never murmured any other. Besides, women prefer to make use of appellations suitable to every one in general, such as "wolf," or "pussy-cat," or "white rabbit"--M. Hervart, who was thin, had been generally called "wolf." "Xavier," he said at last. Rose seemed satisfied. She began eating blackberries as she had done the day before. M. Hervart--just as he had done yesterday, opened his magnifying glass; he counted the black spots on the back of a lady-bird, _coccinella septempunctata_; there were only six. In the palm of her little hand, well smeared already with purple, Rose placed a fine blackberry and held it out to M. Hervart. As he did not lift his head, but still sat there, one eye shut, the other absorbed in what he was looking at, she said gently, in a voice without affection, a voice that was deliciously natural: "Xavier!" M. Hervart felt an intense emotion. He looked at Rose with surprised and troubled eyes. She was still holding out her hand. He ate the blackberry in a kiss and then repeated several times in succession, "Rose, Rose...." "How pale you are!" she said equally moved.