tly saw Marie, sitting
and musing by the window. As I came in she got up--it was Marthe! The
light from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl's
golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something
like a wrinkle. Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded
and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes
were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk and reddened.

The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me. This little Marthe,
with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist
lips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves,
is an affecting picture of what Marie was. It is a sort of terrible
revelation. In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-day
does, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of the
unknown, whom I saw one evening sitting on the rose-tree seat, shining,
silent--in the presence of love.

It required a great effort on my part not to try, weakly and vainly, to
approach Marthe--the impossible dream, the dream of dreams! She has a
little love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, and
rather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips away
from her side; and that day when she sang so much in spite of herself,
it was because a little rival was ill. I am as much a stranger to her
girlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy!
One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at the
doorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world.

* * * * * *

One winter's day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging my
papers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had not
posted, and I threw the useless document on the fire. When Marie came
back in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dry
herself, and to revive it for the room's twilight; and the letter,
which had been only in part consumed, took fire again. And suddenly
there gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of my
writing--"_I love you as much as you love me_!"

And it was so clear, the inscription that flamed in the darkness, that
it was not worth while even to attempt an explanation.

We could not speak, nor even look at each other! In the fatal
communion of thought which seized us just then, we turned aside from
each other, even shadow-veiled as