my, desperate relinquishment of
all his principles, his sense of morality, his ideals of life. He was
the victim of a malign fate, and there was no use fighting against it.
He must accept it as he would sickness or death. He was untrue to
himself, was a dissembler before himself and others: it lay in the
inexorable logic of things that he must suffer for it. But what a
shipwreck! After a pure and dignified life, wholly filled up by duty
and a striving after knowledge, entirely devoted to warring against the
animal element in man, and to educating himself up to an ideal standard
of freedom from ignoble instincts, thus shamefully to choke and drown
in the muddy lees of a love-potion!

Pilar, who fancied him reconciled to the situation, grew easier in her
mind, and by degrees lost much of her distrust. About a month later,
toward the middle of March, she had so far regained her equanimity as
to allow herself, after a steady resistance, to be persuaded by a
friend to attend her house-warming ball--"pendre la cremaillere," as
they call it in Paris. The friend was quite as superstitious as Pilar
herself, and had vowed a hundred times over that she would have no luck
in her new house if Pilar were absent from the opening ball.

It was not till ten o'clock in the evening that she finally made up her
mind. She waited till Wilhelm had gone to bed, and then sent for
Isabel, and shut herself up with her in the boudoir. After Isabel had
turned up the knave of hearts eight times running, and she had seen
that Wilhelm was in bed, reading the newspaper, she gave Anne and Don
Pablo a few orders, dressed hurriedly, and went off, after many kisses
and embraces, and with the promise of not staying long.

Wilhelm read his paper to the end, blew out the light, and turned
himself to the wall. But sleep forsook him, and he stared with
wide-open eyes into the darkness. Suddenly an odd suggestion flashed
across his mind--was rejected--returned again obstinately, grew
stronger, and finally was so imperative that Wilhelm sat up in bed
excitedly and relit the candles. Don Pablo had gone home, Anne had
accompanied Pilar, Isabel was in the back premises, engaged upon the
Val de Penas, two fresh casks of which had lately arrived, and Auguste
was probably in his bedroom asleep. He was as good as alone in the
house. Now or never!

He sprang out of bed, and began to dress with a beating heart. Had it
come to this with him? He was on the point of comm