I fell into an abyss of terrible reflections, as I perceived the depths unknown of the life now lighted up by this expiring flame.  The clouds of my egotism rolled away.  She had suffered as much as I—­more than I, for she was dead.  She believed that others would be kind to her friend; she was so blinded by love that she had never so much as suspected the enmity of her daughter.  That last proof of her tenderness pained me terribly.  Poor Henriette wished to give me Clochegourde and her daughter.

Natalie, from that dread day when first I entered a graveyard following the remains of my noble Henriette, whom now you know, the sun has been less warm, less luminous, the nights more gloomy, movement less agile, thought more dull.  There are some departed whom we bury in the earth, but there are others more deeply loved for whom our souls are winding-sheets, whose memory mingles daily with our heart-beats; we think of them as we breathe; they are in us by the tender law of a metempsychosis special to love.  A soul is within my soul.  When some good thing is done by me, when some true word is spoken, that soul acts and speaks.  All that is good within me issues from that grave, as the fragrance of a lily fills the air; sarcasm, bitterness, all that you blame in me is mine.  Natalie, when next my eyes are darkened by a cloud or raised to heaven after long contemplation of earth, when my lips make no reply to your words or your devotion, do not ask me again, “Of what are you thinking?”

* * * * *

Dear Natalie, I ceased to write some days ago; these memories were too bitter for me.  Still, I owe you an account of the events which followed this catastrophe; they need few words.  When a life is made up of action and movement it is soon told, but when it passes in the higher regions of the soul its story becomes diffuse.  Henriette’s letter put the star of hope before my eyes.  In this great shipwreck I saw an isle on which I might be rescued.  To live at Clochegourde with Madeleine, consecrating my life to hers, was a fate which satisfied the ideas of which my heart was full.  But it was necessary to know the truth as to her real feelings.  As I was bound to bid the count farewell, I went to Clochegourde to see him, and met him on the terrace.  We walked up and down for some time.  At first he spoke of the countess like a man who knew the extent of his loss, and all the injury it was doing to his inner self.  But after the first outbreak of his grief was over he seemed more concerned about the future than the present.  He feared his daughter, who, he told me, had not her mother’s gentleness.  Madeleine’s firm character, in which there was something heroic blending with her mother’s gracious nature, alarmed the old man, used to Henriette’s tenderness, and he now foresaw the power of a will that never yielded.  His only consolation for his irreparable loss, he said, was the certainty of soon rejoining his wife; the agitations, the griefs of