re than your
moral solitude of to-day. You see, I came to your home with so much joy,
because I was free, because each time I could say to myself that I need
not return again. Such a confession is not romantic. But it is thus. If
that relation became a bond, an obligation, a fixed framework in which to
move, a circle of habits in which to imprison me, I should only have one
thought--flight. An engagement for my entire life? No, no, I could not
bear it. There are souls of passage as well as birds of passage, and I am
one. You will understand it tomorrow, now, and you will remember that I
have spoken to you as a man of honor, who would be miserable if he
thought he had augmented, involuntarily, the sorrows of your life when
his only desire was to assuage them. My God! What is to be done?" he
cried, on seeing, as he spoke, tears gush from the young girl's eyes,
which she did not wipe away.

"Go away," she replied, "leave me. I do not want you. I am grateful to
you for not having deceived me."

"But your presence is too cruel. I am ashamed of having spoken to you,
now that I know you do not love me. I have been mad, do not punish me by
remaining longer. After the conversation we have just had, my honor will
not permit us to talk longer."

"You are right," said Julien, after another pause. He took his hat, which
he had placed upon a table at the beginning of that visit, so rapidly and
abruptly terminated by a confession of sentiments so strange. He said:

"Then, farewell." She inclined her fair head without replying.

The door was closed. Alba Steno was again alone. Half an hour later, when
the footman entered to ask for orders relative to the carriage sent back
by the Countess, he found her standing motionless at the window from
which she had watched Dorsenne depart. There she had once more been
seized by the temptation of suicide. She had again felt with an
irresistible force the magnetic attraction of death. Life appeared to her
once more as something too vile, too useless, too insupportable to be
borne. The carriage was at her disposal. By way of the Portese gate and
along the Tiber, with the Countess's horses, it would take an hour and a
half to reach the Lake di Porto. She had, too, this pretext, to avoid the
curiosity of the servants: one of the Roman noblewomen of her
acquaintance, Princess Torlonia, owned an isolated villa on the border of
that lake.... She ascended hastily to don her hat. And without writing a