"M. Crépin, it dawns upon me that I am slow to learn the methods of the new morality, and that I shall never justify your choice of a secretary." "You are going to leave me."

"There will be the more room in the coach for monsieur's harem."

I made him a low bow and went off amongst the trees. He called after me-there was some real regret in his voice-" But you will come to harm! be wise!-monsieur ! "

I paid no heed; and the thickets received and buried me.

77

CHAPTER V.

LA GRAND' Bête.

My rupture with Crépin was the preface to a period of my life, the details of which I could never but doubtfully piece together in my mind. During this period I lived, but how I supported existence is a problem that it is beyond my I have an indistinct memory power to solve. of wandering amongst trees - always amongst trees; in light and darkness; in drought and in dew; of scaring and being scared by snakes, that rustled from me over patches of dead leaves; of swallowing, in desperate phases of hunger, berries and forest fruits, of whose properties I was as ignorant as of their names.

And, throughout, the strange thought dwelt with me, warm and insistent, that I was the champion elect of that white Carinne with whom I had never so much as exchanged a word. To me she was the Una of these fathomless green depths the virgin who had carried her maidenhood and her pride to the Republic of the woods,

where security and an equal condition were the right of all.

This fanciful image possessed a singular fascination for me. It glimmered behind trees; it peered through the thick interlace of branches; I heard the paddle of its feet in mossy rills, or the low song of its voice rising from some shadow prostrate in beds of fern. No doubt fatigue and hunger and that sense of a long responsibility repudiated came to work a melodious madness in my brain. For days, loitering aimlessly under its spell, I was happy — happier, I believe, than I had ever been hitherto. I had become a thing apart from mankind—a faun-a reversion to the near soulless type, but with the germ of spirit budding in me.

It was a desire to avoid a certain horror dangling over a track that had at first driven me into the thickets, and so lost me my way. The memory of a blot of shadow, on the sunny grass underneath that same horror, that swayed sluggishly, like the disc of a pendulum, as the body swayed above, got into my waking thoughts and haunted them. I wished to put a world-wide interval between myself and the blot-though I had seen monstrosities enough of late, God knows. But, in the silent woods, under that enchanted fancy of my relapse to primitive conditions, a loathing of the dead man, such as Cain might have felt, sickened all my veins. I was done with violence-astonished that its employ

ment could ever have entered into the systems of such a defenceless race as man.

But also I knew that to me, moving no longer under the ægis of authority, the towns and the resorts of men were become quagmires for my uncertain feet. I was three hundred miles from Paris; all my neighbourhood was dominated by Revolutionary Committees; my chance of escape, did once that black cuttle-fish of the "Terror touch me with a tentacle, a finger-snap would express. My hitherto immunity was due, indeed, to the offices of certain friends, and a little, perhaps, to my constitutional tendency to allow circumstances to shape my personality as they listed. Resigned to the remotest possibilities, my absence of affectation was in a sense my safeguard.

Here, however, far from the centre of operations, that which, under certain conditions, had proved my protection, would avail me nothing. A sober nonchalance, an easy manner, would be the very thyrsus to whip these coarse provincial hinds to madness. And, finding in my new emancipation -or intellectual decadence-an ecstasy I had not known before, I was very tender of my life, and had no longer that old power of indifference in me to the processes of fatality.

How long this state of exaltation lasted I do not know; but I know it came to me all in a moment that I must eat or die. It was the reflection of my own face, I think, in a little pool of water, that

wrought in me this first dull recrudescence of reason. The wild countenance of a maniac stared up at me. Its hollow jaws bristled like the withered husks of a chestnut; its lips were black with the juice of berries; an animal abandon slept in the pupils of its eyes. Ah! it was better that reason should triumph over circumstance than that the soul should subscribe tamely to its own disinheritance.

All in an instant I had set off running through the wood. That privilege of man, to dare and to fail, I would not abrogate for all the green retreats of nature.

For hours, it seemed to me, I hurried onwards. My heart sobbed in my chest; my breath was like a knotted cord under my shirt. At last, quite suddenly, blue sky came at me through the trunks, and I broke from the dense covert into a field of maize, and found myself looking down a half mile of sloping arable land upon a large town of ancient houses, whereof at the gate opposite me the tricolour mounted guard on the height of a sombre tower.

Now, in view of this, my purpose somewhat wavering, I sat me down in the thick of the corn and set to wondering how I could act for the best. I had assignats in my pocket, and a little money, yet there could be no dealings for me in the open market. Thinking of my appearance, I knew that by my own act I had yielded myself to the condition of a hunted creature.

All the afternoon I crouched in patches of the