“I could wish that our affection—­and it is profound, is it not, Guy?—­dated only from the moment that we have just passed.”

“I do not regret the past,” he said.

“Nor I!  Yet I would like to efface it—­yes, by a single stroke!”

She held between her white fingers some rebellious little locks of hair that had come out, which she had rolled and twisted, and casting them into the clear flame, she said: 

“See! to burn it like that!—­Pft!—­”

“Burn it?” Lissac repeated.

He had left the window, returned to Marianne and smiling in his turn, he said: 

“Why burn it?—­Because it is tiresome or because it is dangerous?”

“Both!” she replied.

She paused for a moment before continuing, drew up over her arms the lace of her chemisette, then half bending her head, and looking at Guy like a creditor of love she said: 

“You still have my letters, my dear?”

“Your letters?”

“Those of the old days?”

“That is so,” he said.  “The past.”

He understood everything now.

“You came to ask me to return them?”

“I have been, you must admit, very considerate, not to have claimed them—­before!”

“You have been—­generous!” answered Lissac, with a gracious smile.

He opened his secretaire, one of the drawers of which contained little packages folded and tied with bands of silk ribbon, that slept the sleep of forgotten things.

“There are your letters, my dear Marianne!  But you have nothing to fear; they have never left this spot.”

The eyes of the young woman sparkled with a joyous light.  Slowly as if afraid that Guy would not give them to her, she extended her bare arm toward the packet of letters and snatched it suddenly.

“My letters!”

“It is an entire romance,” said Lissac.

“Less the epilogue!” she said, still enveloping him with her intense look.

She placed the packet on the velvet-covered mantelpiece and hastily finished dressing.  Then taking between her fingers those little letters in their old-fashioned envelopes bearing her monogram, and that still bore traces of a woman’s perfume, she looked at them for a moment and said to Lissac: 

“You have read them occasionally?”

“I know them by heart!”

“My poor letters!—­I was quite sincere, you know, when I wrote you them!—­They must be very artless!  Yours, that I have burned, were too clever.  I remember that one day you wrote me from Holland:  ’I pass my life among chefs-d’oeuvre, but my mind is far away from them.  I have Rembrandt and Ruysdael; but the smallest millet seed would be more to my liking:  millet is fair!’ Well, that was very pretty, but much too refined.  True love has no wit.—­All this is to convey to you that literature will not lose much by the disappearance of my disconnected scrawls.”