“Truly?”

“Oh, Madame, it is a very natural sentiment, which you must have inspired more than once.  But common people feel it without being conscious of it, while my vivid imagination represents me to myself incessantly.  I contemplate my mind, at times splendid, often hideous.  If you had been able to read my mind that night you would have screamed with fright.”

Therese smiled: 

“Farewell, Monsieur Choulette.  Do not forget my medal of Saint Clara.”

He placed his bag on the floor, raised his arm, and pointed his finger: 

“You have nothing to fear from me.  But the one whom you will love and who will love you will harm you.  Farewell, Madame.”

He took his luggage and went out.  She saw his long, rustic form disappear behind the bushes of the garden.

In the afternoon she went to San Marco, where Dechartre was waiting for her.  She desired yet she feared to see him again so soon.  She felt an anguish which an unknown sentiment, profoundly soft, appeased.  She did not feel the stupor of the first time that she had yielded for love; she did not feel the brusque vision of the irreparable.  She was under influences slower, more vague, and more powerful.  This time a charming reverie bathed the reminiscence of the caresses which she had received.  She was full of trouble and anxiety, but she felt no regret.  She had acted less through her will than through a force which she divined to be higher.  She absolved herself because of her disinterestedness.  She counted on nothing, having calculated nothing.

Doubtless, she had been wrong to yield, since she was not free; but she had exacted nothing.  Perhaps she was for him only a violent caprice.  She did not know him.  She had not one of those vivid imaginations that surpass immensely, in good as in evil, common mediocrity.  If he went away from her and disappeared she would not reproach him for it; at least, she thought not.  She would keep the reminiscence and the imprint of the rarest and most precious thing one may find in the world.  Perhaps he was incapable of real attachment.  He thought he loved her.  He had loved her for an hour.  She dared not wish for more, in the embarrassment of the false situation which irritated her frankness and her pride, and which troubled the lucidity of her intelligence.  While the carriage was carrying her to San Marco, she persuaded herself that he would say nothing to her of the day before, and that the room from which one could see the pines rise to the sky would leave to them only the dream of a dream.

He extended his hand to her.  Before he had spoken she saw in his look that he loved her as much now as before, and she perceived at the same time that she wished him to be thus.

“You—­” he said, “I have been here since noon.  I was waiting, knowing that you would not come so soon, but able to live only at the place where I was to see you.  It is you!  Talk; let me see and hear you.”