opening.
Then with an extraordinary sensation she recollected that she was again
in the midst of the gaiety of the ballroom after that terrific scene
which had changed the whole course of her life. She began to shiver
violently.

"M. de Montriveau's prophecy has shaken my nerves," she said. "It was
a joke, but still I will see whether his axe from London will haunt me
even in my sleep. So good-bye, dear.--Good-bye, M. le Marquis."

As she went through the rooms she was beset with inquiries and regrets.
Her world seemed to have dwindled now that she, its queen, had fallen so
low, was so diminished. And what, moreover, were these men compared with
him whom she loved with all her heart; with the man grown great by all
that she had lost in stature? The giant had regained the height that he
had lost for a while, and she exaggerated it perhaps beyond measure. She
looked, in spite of herself, at the servant who had attended her to the
ball. He was fast asleep.

"Have you been here all the time?" she asked.

"Yes, madame."

As she took her seat in her carriage she saw, in fact, that her coachman
was drunk--so drunk, that at any other time she would have been afraid;
but after a great crisis in life, fear loses its appetite for common
food. She reached home, at any rate, without accident; but even there
she felt a change in herself, a new feeling that she could not shake
off. For her, there was now but one man in the world; which is to say
that henceforth she cared to shine for his sake alone.

While the physiologist can define love promptly by following out natural
laws, the moralist finds a far more perplexing problem before him if
he attempts to consider love in all its developments due to social
conditions. Still, in spite of the heresies of the endless sects that
divide the church of Love, there is one broad and trenchant line of
difference in doctrine, a line that all the discussion in the world can
never deflect. A rigid application of this line explains the nature
of the crisis through which the Duchess, like most women, was to pass.
Passion she knew, but she did not love as yet.

Love and passion are two different conditions which poets and men of the
world, philosophers and fools, alike continually confound. Love implies
a give and take, a certainty of bliss that nothing can change; it
means so close a clinging of the heart, and an exchange of happiness so
constant, that there is no room left for jealousy. Then