And we may add, would Providence suffer it?  Not that we should lightly use this word Providence, and suspend over M. de Camors a menace of supernatural chastisement.  Providence does not intervene in human events except through the logic of her eternal laws.  She has only the sanction of these laws; and it is for this reason she is feared.  At the end of August M. de Camors repaired to the principal town in the district, to perform his duties in the Council-General.  The session finished, he paid a visit to Madame de Campvallon before returning to Reuilly.  He had neglected her a little in the course of the summer, and had only visited Campvallon at long intervals, as politeness compelled him.  The Marquise wished to keep him for dinner, as she had no guests with her.  She pressed him so warmly that, reproaching himself all the time, he consented.  He never saw her without pain.  She always brought back to him those terrible memories, but also that terrible intoxication.  She had never been more beautiful.  Her deep mourning embellished yet more her languishing and regal grace; it made her pale complexion yet more fair, and it heightened the brilliancy of her look.  She had the air of a young tragic queen, or of an allegory of Night.  In the evening an hour arrived when the reserve which for some time had marked their relations was forgotten.  M. de Camors found himself, as in olden time, at the feet of the young Marquise—­his eyes gazing into hers, and covering with kisses her lovely hands.  She was strange that evening.  She looked at him with a wild tenderness, instilling, at pleasure, into his veins the poison of burning passion then escaping him, the tears gathering in her eyes.  Suddenly, by one of those magical movements of hers, she enveloped with her hands the head of her lover, and spoke to him quite low beneath the shadow of this perfumed veil.

“We might be so happy!” she said.

“Are we not so?” said Camors.

“No!  I at least am not, for you are not all mine, as I am yours.  This appears harder, now that I am free.  If you had remained free—­when I think of it! or if you could become so, it would be heaven!”

“You know that I am not so!  Why speak of it?”

She drew nearer to him, and with her breath, more than with her voice, answered: 

“Is it impossible?  Tell me!”

“How?” he demanded.

She did not reply, but her fixed look, caressing and cruel, answered him.

“Speak, then, I beg of you!” murmured Camors.

“Have you not told me—­I have not forgotten it—­that we are united by ties stronger than all others; that the world and its laws exist no longer for us; that there is no other good, no other bad for us, but our happiness or our unhappiness?  Well, we are not happy, and if we could be so—­listen, I have thought well over it!”

Her lips touched the cheek of Camors, and the murmur of her last words was lost in her kisses.