"You can fancy from this incident of my youth how happy I was
merely to live in the sphere of your existence, to groom your
horse, to find the new-coined gold for your purse, to prepare the
splendor of your dinners and your balls, to see you eclipsing the
elegance of those whose fortunes were greater than yours, and all
by my own good management. Ah! with what ardor I have ransacked
Paris when Adam would say to me, '_She_ wants this or that.' It was
a joy such as I can never express to you. You wished for a trifle
at one time which kept me seven hours in a cab scouring the city;
and what delight it was to weary myself for you. Ah! when I saw
you, unseen by you, smiling among your flowers, I could forget
that no one loved me. On certain days, when my happiness turned my
head, I went at night and kissed the spot where, to me, your feet
had left their luminous traces. The air you had breathed was
balmy; in it I breathed in more of life; I inhaled, as they say
persons do in the tropics, a vapor laden with creative principles.

"I _must_ tell you these things to explain the strange presumption
of my involuntary thoughts,--I would have died rather than avow it
until now.

"You will remember those few days of curiosity when you wished to
know the man who performed the household miracles you had
sometimes noticed. I thought,--forgive me, madame,--I believed you
might love me. Your good-will, your glances interpreted by me, a
lover, seemed to me so dangerous--for me--that I invented that
story of Malaga, knowing it was the sort of liaison which women
cannot forgive. I did it in a moment when I felt that my love
would be communicated, fatally, to you. Despise me, crush me with
the contempt you have so often cast upon me when I did not deserve
it; and yet I am certain that, if, on that evening when your aunt
took Adam away from you, I had said what I have now written to
you, I should, like the tamed tiger that sets his teeth once more
in living flesh, and scents the blood, and--

"Midnight.

"I could not go on; the memory of that hour is still too living.
Yes, I was maddened. Was there hope for me in your eyes? then
victory with its scarlet banners would have flamed in mine and
fascinated yours. My crime has been to think all this; perhaps
wrongly. You alone can judge of that dreadful scene when I