yes as though she were just
awaking. It was true--and the other one? . . . Kindled by the proposed
sacrifice which was to be her expiation, she had forgotten the man
before her.

"You!" she said after a long pause. "You must leave me. . . . Life is
not what we have thought it. Had it not been for the war, we might,
perhaps, have realized our dream, but now! . . . Listen carefully and
try to understand. For the remainder of my life, I shall carry the
heaviest burden, and yet at the same time it will be sweet, since the
more it weighs me down the greater will my atonement be. Never will I
leave this man whom I have so grievously wronged, now that he is more
alone in the world and will need protection like a child. Why do you
come to share my fate? How could it be possible for you to live with
a nurse constantly at the side of a blind and worthy man whom we would
constantly offend with our passion? . . . No, it is better for us to
part. Go your way, alone and untrammelled. Leave me; you will meet other
women who will make you more happy than I. Yours is the temperament that
finds new pleasures at every step."

She stood firmly to her decision. Her voice was calm, but back of it
trembled the emotion of a last farewell to a joy which was going from
her forever. The man would be loved by others . . . and she was giving
him up! . . . But the noble sadness of the sacrifice restored her
courage. Only by this renunciation could she expiate her sins.

Julio dropped his eyes, vanquished and perplexed. The picture of the
future outlined by Marguerite terrified him. To live with her as a nurse
taking advantage of her patient's blindness would be to offer him fresh
insult every day. . . . Ah, no! That would be villainy, indeed! He was
now ashamed to recall the malignity with which, a little while before,
he had regarded this innocent unfortunate. He realized that he was
powerless to contend with him. Weak and helpless as he was sitting there
on the garden bench, he was stronger and more deserving of respect than
Julio Desnoyers with all his youth and elegance. The victim had amounted
to something in his life; he had done what Julio had not dared to do.

This sudden conviction of his inferiority made him cry out like an
abandoned child, "What will become of me?" . . .

Marguerite, too--contemplating the love which was going from her
forever, her vanished hopes, the future illumined by the satisfaction of
duty fulfilled but monoton