ised.

He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he
had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,--the innocents say to die
of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes,
sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without
leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his
life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he
should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he
should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he
had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and
forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love
of this blase Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again
looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had
flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had
agreeably affected him.

Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled
strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and
half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest,
she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance
of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.

Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance
embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a
nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her
curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a
trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she
were playing a scale on a keyboard.

Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from
the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils,
something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw,
shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his
brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a
liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been
gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within
him.

Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of
old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful
sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection
with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet
odor floated