they a rise naturally out of what has taken place.

But to return to the first day of my liaison. When I reached home I
was in a state of mad gaiety. As I thought of how the barriers which my
imagination had placed between Marguerite and myself had disappeared, of
how she was now mine; of the place I now had in her thoughts, of the key
to her room which I had in my pocket, and of my right to use this key, I
was satisfied with life, proud of myself, and I loved God because he had
let such things be.

One day a young man is passing in the street, he brushes against a
woman, looks at her, turns, goes on his way. He does not know the woman,
and she has pleasures, griefs, loves, in which he has no part. He does
not exist for her, and perhaps, if he spoke to her, she would only laugh
at him, as Marguerite had laughed at me. Weeks, months, years pass, and
all at once, when they have each followed their fate along a different
path, the logic of chance brings them face to face. The woman becomes
the man's mistress and loves him. How? why? Their two existences are
henceforth one; they have scarcely begun to know one another when it
seems as if they had known one another always, and all that had gone
before is wiped out from the memory of the two lovers. It is curious,
one must admit.

As for me, I no longer remembered how I had lived before that night.
My whole being was exalted into joy at the memory of the words we had
exchanged during that first night. Either Marguerite was very clever
in deception, or she had conceived for me one of those sudden passions
which are revealed in the first kiss, and which die, often enough, as
suddenly as they were born.

The more I reflected the more I said to myself that Marguerite had no
reason for feigning a love which she did not feel, and I said to myself
also that women have two ways of loving, one of which may arise from the
other: they love with the heart or with the senses. Often a woman takes
a lover in obedience to the mere will of the senses, and learns without
expecting it the mystery of immaterial love, and lives henceforth only
through her heart; often a girl who has sought in marriage only the
union of two pure affections receives the sudden revelation of physical
love, that energetic conclusion of the purest impressions of the soul.

In the midst of these thoughts I fell asleep; I was awakened by a letter
from Marguerite containing these words:

"Here are my orders: To-ni