“I am so happy!” she murmured; “I wish I could die so!”

Lucan pushed her off from him the length of his arm, then, suddenly seizing her again and clasping her tightly to his heart, he cast upon her a troubled glance, and then another upon the abyss.  She certainly thought they were about to die.  A slight tremor passed across her lips; she smiled; her head half rolled back: 

“With you?” she said—­“what happiness!”

At the same moment, the sound of voices was heard a short distance above them.  Lucan recognized Clotilde’s and the count’s voices.  His arm suddenly relaxed and dropped from Julia’s waist.  He pointed out to her, without speaking, but with an imperious gesture, the path that wound around the rock.

“Without you, then!” she said, in a gentle and proud tone.  And she began ascending.

Two minutes later, they reached the plateau above the cliff, and related to Clotilde the perils of their ascension, which explained sufficiently their evident agitation.  At least they thought so.

During the evening of this same day, Julia, Monsieur de Moras, and Clotilde were walking after dinner under the evergreens of the garden.  Monsieur de Lucan, after keeping them company for a short time, had just retired, under pretense of writing some letters.  He remained, however, but a few minutes in the library, where the sound of the others’ voices reached his ears and disturbed his attention.  A desire for absolute solitude, for meditation, perhaps also some whimsical and unaccountable feeling, led him to that very ladies’ walk stamped for him with such an indelible recollection.

He walked slowly through it for some time, in the deepening shades with which the falling night was rapidly filling it.  He wished to consult his soul, as it were, face to face, to probe like a man his mind to its utmost depths.  What he discovered there terrified him.  It was a mad intoxication, which the savor of crime further heightened.  Duty, loyalty, honor, all that rose before his passion to oppose it only exasperated its fury.  The pagan Venus was gnawing at his heart, and instilling her most subtle poisons into it.  The image of the fatal beauty was there without truce, present in his burning brain, before his dazzled eyes; he inhaled with avidity and in spite of himself, its languor, its perfume, its breath.

The sound of light footsteps upon the sand caused him to suspend his march.  He caught through the darkness a glimpse of a white form approaching him.

It was she!

Without giving scarce a thought to the act, he threw himself behind the obscure angle formed by one of those massive pillars that supported the ruins against the side of the hill.  A mass of verdure made the darkness there more dense still.  She went by, her eyes fixed upon the ground, with her supple and rhythmical step.  She walked as far as the little pond that received the waters of the brook, stood