ul feeling, which was
still uncertain and hardly awakened. Olivier had believed that love
began with reveries and with poetic exaltations. But his feeling, on the
contrary, seemed to come from an indefinable emotion, more physical
than mental. He was nervous and restless, as if under the shadow of
threatening illness, though nothing painful entered into this fever of
the blood which by contagion stirred his mind also. He was quite aware
that Madame de Guilleroy was the cause of his agitation; that it was due
to the memories she left him and to the expectation of her return. He
did not feel drawn to her by an impulse of his whole being, but he
felt her always near him, as if she never had left him; she left to
him something of herself when she departed--something subtle and
inexpressible. What was it? Was it love? He probed deep in his heart in
order to see, to understand. He thought her charming, but she was not
at all the type of ideal woman that his blind hope had created. Whoever
calls upon love has foreseen the moral traits and physical charms of her
who will enslave him; and Madame de Guilleroy, although she pleased him
infinitely, did not appear to him to be that woman.

But why did she thus occupy his thought, above all others, in a way so
different, so unceasing? Had he simply fallen into the trap set by her
coquetry, which he had long before understood, and, circumvented by his
own methods, was he now under the influence of that special fascination
which gives to women the desire to please?

He paced here and there, sat down, sprang up, lighted cigarettes and
threw them away, and his eyes every instant looked at the clock, whose
hands moved toward the usual hour in slow, unhurried fashion.

Several times already he had almost raised the convex glass over the
two golden arrows turning so slowly, in order to push the larger one on
toward the figure it was approaching so lazily. It seemed to him that
this would suffice to make the door open, and that the expected one
would appear, deceived and brought to him by this ruse. Then he smiled
at this childish, persistent, and unreasonable desire.

At last he asked himself this question: "Could I become her lover?"
This idea seemed strange to him, indeed hardly to be realized or even
pursued, because of the complications it might bring into his life. Yet
she pleased him very much, and he concluded: "Decidedly I am in a very
strange state of mind."

The clock struck,