nocent creature had been
brought up in hatred toward her mother, and that I could not hope to
win her young heart back to me again. What I felt--but enough! What do
you care for my sorrows? I pressed the child to my breast for the last
time, and then let her go from me forever. When you get home, you will
find her there. This is the truth. And if I had to die this moment I
could not say anything else."

She drew herself up at these words; her eyes glistened with moisture,
her features assumed an expression of anxious emotion, and her gestures
were hasty and ungraceful.

"Well?" she queried. "Are you not yet satisfied? Have I something still
that your hate begrudges me, that you would like to tear from me? Take
it--take all I have--take even my miserable life, that you have spared
me until now, for I see what you are aiming at when you say you want to
put an end to this. Yes, an end to my woes, to my disappointed hopes,
to my happiness and my honor--an end to this wretched creature, that
wanders through the world like a leaf torn from a tree, finding rest
nowhere--nowhere until it sinks into the mud and rots there."

She threw herself on the sofa, and burst into a flood of tears.

He knew these tears. He knew that she possessed the art of moving
herself in order to move others. But still he felt a deep pity for this
unhappy nature, which could not even in its truest grief weep truly.

"Lucie," he said--it was the first time he had addressed her by her
name--"you are quite right, you are unhappy and I am partly to blame
for it. I ought to have been a wiser man, and never to have thought of
making you my wife. We are of different blood; you are in your element
when you are pretending to be something you are not. I--but why talk
about it? We know it all--we ought to have known it then; it would have
spared us much bitterness. And now, Lucie, you see I am not unjust; I
share the blame between us, just as I have borne my good half of the
misfortune. But shall it go on this way and make both of us wretched
all our lives? I have written all this to you. Why didn't you read my
letters better? We should now understand one another, and should be
able to conclude what still remains to be done in a more friendly
spirit."

"Your letters?" she said, suddenly drawing herself up and drying her
tears. "I read them only too well. I know that in and between the lines
there was but one thought: 'I will be free!--free at any price!' I