We reached the terrace and found the count sitting in a chair, in the sun.  The sight of that sunken face, scarcely brightened by a feeble smile, extinguished the last flames that came from the ashes.  I leaned against the balustrade and considered the picture of that poor wreck, between his sickly children and his wife, pale with her vigils, worn out by extreme fatigue, by the fears, perhaps also by the joys of these terrible months, but whose cheeks now glowed from the emotions she had just passed through.  At the sight of that suffering family beneath the trembling leafage through which the gray light of a cloudy autumn sky came dimly, I felt within me a rupture of the bonds which hold the body to the spirit.  There came upon me then that moral spleen which, they say, the strongest wrestlers know in the crisis of their combats, a species of cold madness which makes a coward of the bravest man, a bigot of an unbeliever, and renders those it grasps indifferent to all things, even to vital sentiments, to honor, to love—­for the doubt it brings takes from us the knowledge of ourselves and disgusts us with life itself.  Poor, nervous creatures, whom the very richness of your organization delivers over to this mysterious, fatal power, who are your peers and who your judges?  Horrified by the thoughts that rose within me, and demanding, like the wicked man, “Where is now thy God?” I could not restrain the tears that rolled down my cheeks.

“What is it, dear Felix?” said Madeleine in her childish voice.

Then Henriette put to flight these dark horrors of the mind by a look of tender solicitude which shone into my soul like a sunbeam.  Just then the old huntsman brought me a letter from Tours, at sight of which I made a sudden cry of surprise, which made Madame de Mortsauf tremble.  I saw the king’s signet and knew it contained my recall.  I gave her the letter and she read it at a glance.

“What will become of me?” she murmured, beholding her desert sunless.

We fell into a stupor of thought which oppressed us equally; never had we felt more strongly how necessary we were to one another.  The countess, even when she spoke indifferently of other things, seemed to have a new voice, as if the instrument had lost some chords and others were out of tune.  Her movements were apathetic, her eyes without light.  I begged her to tell me her thoughts.

“Have I any?” she replied in a dazed way.

She drew me into her chamber, made me sit upon the sofa, took a package from the drawer of her dressing-table, and knelt before me, saying:  “This hair has fallen from my head during the last year; take it, it is yours; you will some day know how and why.”

Slowly I bent to meet her brow, and she did not avoid my lips.  I kissed her sacredly, without unworthy passion, without one impure impulse, but solemnly, with tenderness.  Was she willing to make the sacrifice; or did she merely come, as I did once, to the verge of the precipice?  If love were leading her to give herself could she have worn that calm, that holy look; would she have asked, in that pure voice of hers, “You are not angry with me, are you?”