to our nights their long-lost sleep, and to the days their gladness.  What hand is this that year by year has tied new cords between us?  Are we not more than brother and sister?  That which heaven has joined we must not keep asunder.  The sufferings you reveal are the seeds scattered by the sower for the harvest already ripening in the sunshine.  Shall we not gather it sheaf by sheaf?  What strength is in me that I dare address you thus!  Answer, or I will never again recross that river!”

“You have spared me the word love,” she said, in a stern voice, “but you have spoken of a sentiment of which I know nothing and which is not permitted to me.  You are a child; and again I pardon you, but for the last time.  Endeavor to understand, Monsieur, that my heart is, as it were, intoxicated with motherhood.  I love Monsieur de Mortsauf neither from social duty nor from a calculated desire to win eternal blessings, but from an irresistible feeling which fastens all the fibres of my heart upon him.  Was my marriage a mistake?  My sympathy for misfortune led to it.  It is the part of women to heal the woes caused by the march of events, to comfort those who rush into the breach and return wounded.  How shall I make you understand me?  I have felt a selfish pleasure in seeing that you amused him; is not that pure motherhood?  Did I not make you see by what I owned just now, the three children to whom I am bound, to whom I shall never fail, on whom I strive to shed a healing dew and the light of my own soul without withdrawing or adulterating a single particle?  Do not embitter the mother’s milk! though as a wife I am invulnerable, you must never again speak thus to me.  If you do not respect this command, simple as it is, the door of this house will be closed to you.  I believed in pure friendship, in a voluntary brotherhood, more real, I thought, than the brotherhood of blood.  I was mistaken.  I wanted a friend who was not a judge, a friend who would listen to me in those moments of weakness when reproof is killing, a sacred friend from whom I should have nothing to fear.  Youth is noble, truthful, capable of sacrifice, disinterested; seeing your persistency in coming to us, I believed, yes, I will admit that I believed in some divine purpose; I thought I should find a soul that would be mine, as the priest is the soul of all; a heart in which to pour my troubles when they deluged mine, a friend to hear my cries when if I continued to smother them they would strangle me.  Could I but have this friend, my life, so precious to these children, might be prolonged until Jacques had grown to manhood.  But that is selfish!  The Laura of Petrarch cannot be lived again.  I must die at my post, like a soldier, friendless.  My confessor is harsh, austere, and—­my aunt is dead.”

Two large tears filled her eyes, gleamed in the moonlight, and rolled down her cheeks; but I stretched my hand in time to catch them, and I drank them with an avidity excited by her words, by the thought of those ten years of secret woe, of wasted feelings, of constant care, of ceaseless dread—­years of the lofty heroism of her sex.  She looked at me with gentle stupefaction.