“I say! what are you doing there, monsieur?” said the girl, when, upon turning her head, she discovered the young man.
“My dear girl, I am admiring. I am a great lover of the beauties of nature, and I am as well able to appreciate them in sackcloth as in silk.”
The stout girl, who did not understand this language, concluded that the gentleman was fond of apricots, and offered him one, saying:
“Here, monsieur, here’s one that’s good and ripe.”
Auguste took the apricot and walked still nearer the ladder.
“I’m afraid that you’ll fall,” he said to the gardener; “I’ll hold the ladder.”
“Oh! it ain’t worth while, monsieur, thanks; I know how to do it; anyway I can cling to the branches.”
However, Auguste remained at the foot of the ladder, and as the girl was on the fourth rung, the young man’s hand naturally found itself in close proximity to her leg, and, naturally again, that hand caressed a woolen stocking encasing a calf with which a dancer at the Opéra would have been content.
The gardener continued to gather fruit while Auguste patted her calf.
“On my word!” he thought, “here’s a peasant who knows what’s what, who is learned in the ways of the world. She is not precisely one of Florian’s shepherdesses. This leg reminds me rather of Teniers’s Flemish women; but at all events, it doesn’t scratch, and that’s very lucky, for with such calves as these, the scar would be lasting.”