“You embrace me now every moment, my little one,” said Madame de Tecle to her.  “Is this really all intended for me?”

“My adorable mother,” while embracing her again, “I assure you he is really courting me again.  Why, I am ignorant; but he is courting me and you also, my mother.  Observe it!”

Madame de Tecle did observe it.  In his conversation with her, M. de Camors sought, under every pretext, to recall the souvenirs of the past, common to them both.  It seemed he wished to link the past with his new life; to forget the rest, and pray of them to forget it also.

It was not without fear that these two charming women abandoned themselves to their hopes.  They remembered they were in the presence of an uncertain person; they little trusted a change so sudden, the reason of which they could not comprehend.  They feared it was some passing caprice, which would return to them, if they were its dupes, all their misfortunes, without the dignity which had hitherto attended them.

They were not the only ones struck by this transformation.  M. des Rameures remarked it to them.  The neighboring country people felt in the Count’s language something new—­as it were, a tender humility; they said that in other years he had been polite, but this year he was angelic.  Even the inanimate things, the woods, the trees, the heavens, should have borne the same testimony, for he looked at and studied them with a benevolent curiosity with which he had never before honored them.

In truth, a profound trouble had invaded him and would not leave him.  More than once, before this epoch, his soul, his philosophy, his pride, had received a rude shock, but he had no less pursued his path, rising after every blow, like a lion wounded, but unconquered.  In trampling under his feet all moral belief which binds the vulgar, he had reserved honor as an inviolable limit.  Then, under the empire of his passions, he said to himself that, after all, honor, like all the rest, was conventional.  Then he encountered crime—­he touched it with his hand—­horror seized him—­and he recoiled.  He rejected with disgust the principle which had conducted him there—­asked himself what would become of human society if it had no other.

The simple truths which he had misunderstood now appeared to him in their tranquil splendor.  He could not yet distinguish them clearly; he did not try to give them a name, but he plunged with a secret delight into their shadows and their peace.  He sought them in the pure heart of his child, in the pure love of his young wife, in the daily miracles of nature, in the harmonies of the heavens, and probably already in the depths of his thoughts—­in God.  In the midst of this approach toward a new life he hesitated.  Madame de Campvallon was there.  He still loved her vaguely.  Above all, he could not abandon her without being guilty of a kind of baseness.  Terrible struggles agitated him.  Having done so much evil, would he now be permitted to do good, and gracefully partake of the joys he foresaw?  These ties with the past, his fortune dishonestly acquired, his fatal mistress—­the spectre of that old man would they permit it?