He thought he heard a murmur of voices filling the pathway.

The dead were calling him, those long departed ones, whose warm breath had so strangely perturbed him and his sweetheart during the sultry July evenings.

He recognised their low whispers.

They were rejoicing, they were telling him to come, and promising to restore Miette to him beneath the earth, in some retreat which would prove still more sequestered than this old trysting-place.

The cemetery, whose oppressive odours and dark vegetation had breathed eager desire into the children's hearts, while alluringly spreading out its couches of rank grass, without succeeding however in throwing them into one another's arms, now longed to imbibe Silvere's warm blood.