e. If I was set upon
happiness, I found I must take it by force. I know you better now. You
were capable of never confessing your love to me, of never asking
anything of me. Am I right or not, tell me?"

"You are right," he murmured.

"But that would have been a sin--a deadly sin, a capital crime against
the High Majesty of Nature. What! Fate takes the trouble to think out
the most improbable combinations, sets the most complicated machinery
in motion to bring us together; it drags you out of the depths of
Germany, and me from Castile, and brings us to a little hotel in a
little village in Picardy, the very name of which was unknown to either
of us a short time before; we instantly feel that we are made for one
another and are certain to be happy together, and yet all these
exertions on the part of Fate are to have been in vain? Never! Our
paths crossed each other at a single point, for a moment they were
united, it depended on us whether they should always remain so. And I
was to let you go, never to meet again on this side of eternity? It was
not possible, and as you were so clumsy, or so timid, or so
self-torturing--"

She finished the sentence with a long kiss, at which he closed his eyes
once more, and shut out everything but its flame.

Was it calculation, was it her natural instinct?--suffice it to say
that Pilar never by any chance alluded in their conversations to her
past. She was fond of talking, and talked a great deal, and her
conversation was always startling, original and vivacious; her power of
imagination as lively as her sparkling eyes, springing from the nearest
object to the furthest, from the ordinary to the sublime, but never one
word escaped her which might remind Wilhelm that she had gone through
confessed and unconfessed experiences of every kind, and reached the
turning-point of her existence without him. Her life, it would appear,
had only begun with the moment at which he had risen upon her horizon.
What went before that was torn out of the book of memory--one scarcely
noticed the gaps where the pages were missing. She did all she could to
make him forget that she was a stranger to him, and to strengthen in
him the delusion that she belonged to him, that she was one with him,
that it had always been so. She took possession of his past, she crept
into his ideas and sentiments; she wanted to know everything about him,
down to the smallest details. He must tell her about every day, every
ho