“Come, little Countess,” replied Dorsenne, who began to be terrified by the young girl’s sudden excitement, “it is not reasonable to agitate yourself thus, because yesterday you had a very sad conversation with Fanny Hafner!  First, it is altogether impossible for me to defer my departure.  You force me to give you coarse, almost commercial reasons.  But my book is about to appear, and I must be there for the launching of the sale, of which I have already told you.  And then you are going away, too.  You will have all the diversions of the country, of your Venetian friends and charming Lydia Maitland!”

“Do not mention that name,” interrupted Alba, whose face became discomposed at the allusion to the sojourn at Piove.  “You do not know how you pain me, nor what that woman is, what a monster of cruelty and of perfidy!  Ask me no more.  I shall tell you nothing.  But,” the Contessina that time clasping her hands, her poor, thin hands, which trembled with the anguish of the words she dared to utter, “do you not comprehend that if I speak to you as I do, it is because I have need of you in order to live?” Then in a low voice, choked by emotion:  “It is because I love you!” All the modesty natural to a child of twenty mounted to her pale face in a flood of purple, when she had uttered that avowal.  “Yes, I love you!” she repeated, in an accent as deep, but more firm.  “It is not, however, so common a thing to find real devotion, a being who only asks to serve you, to be useful to you, to live in your shadow.  And you will understand that to have the right of giving you my life, to bear your name, to be your wife, to follow you, I felt very vividly in your presence at the moment I was about to lose you.  You will pardon my lack of modesty for the first, for the last time.  I have suffered too much.”

She ceased.  Never had the absolute purity of the charming creature, born and bred in an atmosphere of corruption, and remaining in the same so intact, so noble, so frank, flashed out as at that moment.  All that virgin and unhappy soul was in her eyes which implored Julien, on her lips which trembled at having spoken thus, on her brow around which floated, like an aureole, the fair hair stirred by the breeze which entered the open window.  She had found the means of daring that prodigious step, the boldest a woman can permit herself, still more so a young girl, with so chaste a simplicity that at that moment Dorsenne would not have dared to touch even the hand of that child who confided herself to him so madly, so loyally.

Dorsenne was undoubtedly greatly interested in her, with a curiosity, without enthusiasm, and against which a reaction had already set in.  That touching speech, in which trembled a distress so tender and each word of which later on made him weep with regret, produced upon him at that moment an impression of fear rather than love or pity.  When at length he broke the cruel silence, the sound of his voice revealed to the unhappy girl the uselessness of that supreme appeal addressed by her to life.