ddenness of his
emotion and her own had overborne her into this strange unmeant
confession; but her mood was unlike his,--it was merely receptive. She
listened to his unavailing regrets, but told him little of her own past.

"It does not matter," she said drearily. "It is all over. Let it
rest. The pain of to-day and tomorrow is enough for us. We have borne
yesterday; why should we want it back again?"

And when they parted she said only one thing of the future:--

"There is no need that we should talk. There is nothing for us beyond
this point. We can only go back. We must try to forget--and be satisfied
with our absinthe."

Instead of returning to his hotel, Edmondstone found his way to the
Champs Elysees, and finally to the Bois. He was too wretched to have any
purpose in his wanderings. He walked rapidly, looking straight before
him and seeing nobody. He scarcely understood his own fierce emotions
Hitherto his fancies had brought him a vague rapture; now he experienced
absolute anguish, Every past experience had become trivial. What
happiness is so keen as one's briefest pain? As he walked he lived again
the days he had thrown away. He remembered a thousand old, yet new,
phases of Bertha's girlhood. He thought of times when she had touched
or irritated or pleased him. When he had left Paris for Rome she had not
bidden him good-by. Jenny, her younger sister, had told him that she was
not well.

"If I had seen her then," he cried inwardly, "I might have read her
heart--and my own."

M. Renard, riding a very tall horse in the Bois, passed him and raised
his eyebrows at the sight of his pallor and his fagged yet excited look.

"There will be a new sonnet," he said to himself. "A sonnet to Despair,
or Melancholy, or Loss."

Afterward, when society became a little restive and eager, M. Renard
looked on with sardonic interest.

"That happy man, M. Villefort," he said to Madame de Castro, "is a good
soul--a good soul. He has no small jealous follies," and his smile was
scarcely a pleasant thing to see.

"There is nothing for us beyond this past," Bertha had said, and
Edmondstone had agreed with her hopelessly.

But he could not quite break away. Sometimes for a week the Villeforts
missed him, and then again they saw him every day. He spent his mornings
with them, joined them in their drives, at their opera-box, or at the
entertainments of their friends. He also fell into his old place in the
Trent household, a