Among the great pebbles the Chevrotte leaped, singing as it went, and making a continuous music as if of crystal.
Angelique was never weary of this out-of-the-way nook.

Yet for seven years she had seen there each morning only what she had looked at on the previous evening.

The trees in the little park of the Hotel Voincourt, whose front was on the Grand Rue, were so tufted and bushy that it was only in the winter she could occasionally catch a glimpse of the daughter of the Countess, Mademoiselle Claire, a young girl of her own age.
In the garden of the Bishop was a still more dense thickness of branches, and she had often tried in vain to distinguish there the violet-coloured cassock of Monseigneur; and the old gate, with its Venetian slats above and at the sides, must have been fastened up for a very long time, for she never remembered to have seen it opened, not even for a gardener to pass through.

Besides the washerwomen in the Clos, she always saw the same poor, ragged little children playing or sleeping in the grass.
The spring this year was unusually mild.

She was just sixteen years of age, and until now she had been glad to welcome with her eyes alone the growing green again of the Clos-Marie under the April sunshine.
The shooting out of the tender leaves, the transparency of the warm evenings, and all the reviving odours of the earth had simply amused her heretofore.