He did not insist, but he was much disturbed; he no longer knew what to think, though indeed he had need for reflection.  He went away after a quarter of an hour of unimportant conversation.

CHAPTER IV

SWEET POISON

With slow steps, Olivier returned to his own house, troubled as if he had just learned some shameful family secret.  He tried to sound his heart, to see clearly within himself, to read those intimate pages of the inner book which seemed glued together, and which sometimes only a strange hand can turn over by separating them.  Certainly he did not believe himself in love with Annette.  The Countess, whose watchful jealousy never slept, had foreseen this danger from afar, and had signaled it before it even existed.  But might that peril exist to-morrow, the day after, in a month?  It was the frank question that he tried to answer sincerely.  It was true that the child stirred his instincts of tenderness, but these instincts in men are so numerous that the dangerous ones should not be confounded with the inoffensive.  Thus he adored animals, especially cats, and could not see their silky fur without being seized with an irresistible sensuous desire to caress their soft, undulating backs and kiss their electric fur.

The attraction that impelled him toward this girl a little resembled those obscure yet innocent desires that go to make up part of all the ceaseless and unappeasable vibrations of human nerves.  His eye of the artist, as well as that of the man, was captivated by her freshness, by that springing of beautiful clear life, by that essence of youth that glowed in her; and his heart, full of memories of his long intimacy with the Countess, finding in the extraordinary resemblance of Annette to her mother a reawakening of old feelings, of emotions sleeping since the beginning of his love, had been startled perhaps by the sensation of an awakening.  An awakening?  Yes.  Was it that?  This idea illumined his mind.  He felt that he had awakened after years of sleep.  If he had loved the young girl without being aware of it, he should have experienced near her that rejuvenation of his whole being which creates a different man as soon as the flame of a new desire is kindled within him.  No, the child had only breathed upon the former fire.  It had always been the mother that he loved, but now a little more than recently, no doubt, because of her daughter, this reincarnation of herself.  And he formulated this decision with the reassuring sophism:  “One loves but once!  The heart may often be affected at meeting some other being, for everyone exercises on others either attractions or repulsions.  All these influences create friendship, caprices, desire for possession, quick and fleeting ardors, but not real love.  That this love may exist it is necessary that two beings should be so truly born for each other, should be linked together in so many