Shortly afterward we met at a progressive card party, and during the evening we were thrown together at one of the tables as partners.  This was really our first meeting since the eventful night at her house.  Strangely enough, in spite of our mutual nervousness, we won every trick of the game, and one of our opponents jokingly quoted the old saw:  “Lucky at cards, unlucky in love.”  Our eyes met and I am sure that in the momentary glance my whole soul went out to her in one great plea.  She lowered her eyes and uttered a nervous little laugh.  During the rest of the game I fully merited the unexpressed and expressed abuse of my various partners; for my eyes followed her wherever she was and I played whatever card my fingers happened to touch.

Later in the evening she went to the piano and began to play very softly, as to herself, the opening bars of the Thirteenth Nocturne.  I felt that the psychic moment of my life had come, a moment which, if lost, could never be called back; and, in as careless a manner as I could assume, I sauntered over to the piano and stood almost bending over her.  She continued playing, but, in a voice that was almost a whisper, she called me by my Christian name and said:  “I love you, I love you, I love you.”  I took her place at the piano and played the Nocturne in a manner that silenced the chatter of the company both in and out of the room, involuntarily closing it with the major triad.

We were married the following spring, and went to Europe for several months.  It was a double joy for me to be in France again under such conditions.

First there came to us a little girl, with hair and eyes dark like mine, but who is growing to have ways like her mother.  Two years later there came a boy, who has my temperament, but is fair like his mother, a little golden-headed god, with a face and head that would have delighted the heart of an old Italian master.  And this boy, with his mother’s eyes and features, occupies an inner sanctuary of my heart; for it was for him that she gave all; and that is the second sacred sorrow of my life.

The few years of our married life were supremely happy, and perhaps she was even happier than I; for after our marriage, in spite of all the wealth of her love which she lavished upon me, there came a new dread to haunt me, a dread which I cannot explain and which was unfounded, but one that never left me.  I was in constant fear that she would discover in me some shortcoming which she would unconsciously attribute to my blood rather than to a failing of human nature.  But no cloud ever came to mar our life together; her loss to me is irreparable.  My children need a mother’s care, but I shall never marry again.  It is to my children that I have devoted my life.  I no longer have the same fear for myself of my secret’s being found out, for since my wife’s death I have gradually dropped out of social life; but there is nothing I would not suffer to keep the brand from being placed upon them.