Again they looked at each other, motionless, joined together by the burning contact of their hands.  She pressed, with gentle movement, the feverish hand she clasped, and he answered these calls by tightening his fingers a little.  Each pressure said something to them, evoked some period of their finished past, revived in their memory the stagnant recollections of their love.  Each was a secret question, each was a mysterious reply, sad questions and sad replies, those “do you remembers?” of a bygone love.

Their minds, in this agonizing meeting, which might be the last, traveled back through the years, through the whole history of their passion; and nothing was audible in the room save the crackling of the fire.

Suddenly, as if awakening from a dream, he said, with a start of terror: 

“Your letters!”

“What?  My letters?” she queried.

“I might have died without destroying them!”

“Oh, what does that matter to me?  That is of no consequence now.  Let them find them and read them—­I don’t care!”

“I will not have that,” he said.  “Get up, Any; open the lowest drawer of my desk, the large one; they are all there, all.  You must take them and throw them into the fire.”

She did not move at all, but remained crouching, as if he had counseled her to do something cowardly.

“Any, I entreat you!” he continued; “if you do not do this, you will torture me, unnerve me, drive me mad.  Think—­they may fall into anyone’s hands, a notary, a servant, or even your husband. . . .  I do not wish. . . .”

She rose, still hesitating, and repeating: 

“No, that is too hard, too cruel!  I feel as if you were compelling me to burn both our hearts!”

He supplicated her, his face drawn with pain.

Seeing him suffer thus, she resigned herself and walked toward the desk.  On opening the drawer, she found it filled to the edge with a thick packet of letters, piled one on top of another, and she recognized on all the envelopes the two lines of the address she had written so often.  She knew them—­those two lines—­a man’s name, the name of a street—­as well as she knew her own name, as well as one can know the few words that have represented to us in life all hope and all happiness.  She looked at them, those little square things that contained all she had known how to express of her love, all that she could take of herself to give to him, with a little ink on a bit of white paper.

He had tried to turn his head on the pillow that he might watch her, and again he said:  “Burn them, quick!”

Then she took two handfuls, holding them a few seconds in her grasp.  They seemed heavy to her, painful, living, at the same time dead, so many different things were in them, so many things that were now over—­so sweet to feel, to dream!  It was the soul of her soul, the heart of her heart, the essence of her loving self that she was holding there; and she remembered with what delirium she had scribbled some of them, with what exaltation, what intoxication of living and of adoring some one, and of expressing it.