for her, to prevent your going elsewhere and forming attachments
which might have resulted in your forgetting her. I did my best--do me
justice--I did my best; perhaps sometimes I pushed things a little far in
her interest, in that of your mother, but in yours more than all; in
yours, for God knows I am all for you," said Giselle, with sudden and
involuntary fervor.

"Yes, I am all yours as a friend, a faithful friend," she resumed, almost
frightened by the tones of her own voice; "but as to the slightest
feeling of love between us, love the most spiritual, the most
platonic--yes, all men, I fancy, have a little of that kind of
self-conceit. Dear Fred, don't imagine it--Enguerrand would never have
allowed it."

She was smiling, half laughing, and he looked at her with astonishment,
asking himself whether he could believe what she was saying, when he
could recollect what seemed to him so many proofs to the contrary. Yet in
what she said there was no hesitation, no incoherence, no false note.
Pride, noble pride, upheld her to the end. The first falsehood of her
life was a masterpiece.

"Ah, Giselle!" he said at last, not knowing what to think, "I adore you!
I revere you!"

"Yes," she replied, with a smile, gracious, yet with a touch of sadness,
"I know you do. But her you love!"

Might it not have been sweet to her had he answered "No, I loved her
once, and remembered that old love enough to risk my life for her, but in
reality I now love only you--all the more at this moment when I see you
love me more than yourself." But, instead, he murmured only, like a man.
and a lover: "And Jacqueline--do you think she loves me?" His anxiety, a
thrill that ran through all his frame, the light in his eyes, his sudden
pallor, told more than his words.

If Giselle could have doubted his love for Jacqueline before, she would
have now been convinced of it. The conviction stabbed her to the heart.
Death is not that last sleep in which all our faculties, weakened and
exhausted, fail us; it is the blow which annihilates our supreme illusion
and leaves us disabused in a cold and empty world. People walk, talk, and
smile after this death--another ghost is added to the drama played on the
stage of the world; but the real self is dead.

Giselle was too much of a woman, angelic as she was, to have any courage
left to say: "Yes, I know she loves you."

She said instead, in a low voice: "That is a question you must ask of
her."

Meant