“Then I am to love without hope and with an absolute devotion.  Well, yes; I will do for you what some men do for God.  I shall feel that you have asked it.  I will enter a seminary and make myself a priest, and then I will educate your son.  Jacques shall be myself in his own form; political conceptions, thoughts, energy, patience, I will give him all.  In that way I shall live near to you, and my love, enclosed in religion as a silver image in a crystal shrine, can never be suspected of evil.  You will not have to fear the undisciplined passions which grasp a man and by which already I have allowed myself to be vanquished.  I will consume my own being in the flame, and I will love you with a purified love.”

She turned pale and said, hurrying her words:  “Felix, do not put yourself in bonds that might prove an obstacle to our happiness.  I should die of grief for having caused a suicide like that.  Child, do you think despairing love a life’s vocation?  Wait for life’s trials before you judge of life; I command it.  Marry neither the Church nor a woman; marry not at all,—­I forbid it.  Remain free.  You are twenty-one years old—­My God! can I have mistaken him?  I thought two months sufficed to know some souls.”

“What hope have you?” I cried, with fire in my eyes.

“My friend, accept our help, rise in life, make your way and your fortune and you shall know my hope.  And,” she added, as if she were whispering a secret, “never release the hand you are holding at this moment.”

She bent to my ear as she said these words which proved her deep solicitude for my future.

“Madeleine!” I exclaimed “never!”

We were close to a wooden gate which opened into the park of Frapesle; I still seem to see its ruined posts overgrown with climbing plants and briers and mosses.  Suddenly an idea, that of the count’s death, flashed through my brain, and I said, “I understand you.”

“I am glad of it,” she answered in a tone which made me know I had supposed her capable of a thought that could never be hers.

Her purity drew tears of admiration from my eyes which the selfishness of passion made bitter indeed.  My mind reacted and I felt that she did not love me enough even to wish for liberty.  So long as love recoils from a crime it seems to have its limits, and love should be infinite.  A spasm shook my heart.

“She does not love me,” I thought.

To hide what was in my soul I stooped over Madeleine and kissed her hair.

“I am afraid of your mother,” I said to the countess presently, to renew the conversation.

“So am I,” she answered with a gesture full of childlike gaiety.  “Don’t forget to call her Madame la duchesse, and to speak to her in the third person.  The young people of the present day have lost these polite manners; you must learn them; do that for my sake.  Besides, it is such good taste to respect women, no matter what their age may be, and to recognize social distinctions