reality?  What! you who give credit to so many as to money, can you not give me the charity of faith?  And on the first occasion in our lives when you might prove to me your boundless trust, do you cast me from my throne in your heart?  Between a madman and me, it is the madman whom you choose to believe? oh, Jules!” She stopped, threw back the hair that fell about her brow and neck, and then, in a heart-rending tone, she added:  “I have said too much; one word should suffice.  If your soul and your forehead still keep this cloud, however light it be, I tell you now that I shall die of it.”

She could not repress a shudder, and turned pale.

“Oh!  I will kill that man,” thought Jules, as he lifted his wife in his arms and carried her to her bed.

“Let us sleep in peace, my angel,” he said.  “I have forgotten all, I swear it!”

Clemence fell asleep to the music of those sweet words, softly repeated.  Jules, as he watched her sleeping, said in his heart:—­

“She is right; when love is so pure, suspicion blights it.  To that young soul, that tender flower, a blight—­yes, a blight means death.”

When a cloud comes between two beings filled with affection for each other and whose lives are in absolute unison, that cloud, though it may disperse, leaves in those souls a trace of its passage.  Either love gains a stronger life, as the earth after rain, or the shock still echoes like distant thunder through a cloudless sky.  It is impossible to recover absolutely the former life; love will either increase or diminish.

At breakfast, Monsieur and Madame Jules showed to each other those particular attentions in which there is always something of affectation.  There were glances of forced gaiety, which seemed the efforts of persons endeavoring to deceive themselves.  Jules had involuntary doubts, his wife had positive fears.  Still, sure of each other, they had slept.  Was this strained condition the effect of a want of faith, or was it only a memory of their nocturnal scene?  They did not know themselves.  But they loved each other so purely that the impression of that scene, both cruel and beneficent, could not fail to leave its traces in their souls; both were eager to make those traces disappear, each striving to be the first to return to the other, and thus they could not fail to think of the cause of their first variance.  To loving souls, this is not grief; pain is still far-off; but it is a sort of mourning, which is difficult to depict.  If there are, indeed, relations between colors and the emotions of the soul, if, as Locke’s blind man said, scarlet produces on the sight the effect produced upon the hearing by a blast of trumpets, it is permissible to compare this reaction of melancholy to mourning tones of gray.

But even so, love saddened, love in which remains a true sentiment of its happiness, momentarily troubled though it be, gives enjoyments derived from pain and pleasure both, which are all novel.  Jules studied his wife’s voice; he watched her glances with the freshness of feeling that inspired him in the earliest days of his passion for her.  The memory of five absolutely happy years, her beauty, the candor of her love, quickly effaced in her husband’s mind the last vestiges of an intolerable pain.