or at her feet, and seizing her hands, began to whisper in her
ear words of tenderness:

"Your person, your slightest movements, seemed to me to have a more than
human importance in the world. My heart was like dust under your feet.
You produced on me the effect of moonlight on a summer's night, when
around us we find nothing but perfumes, soft shadows, gleams of
whiteness, infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spirit
were for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myself
while I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing further. It
was Madame Arnoux such as you were with your two children, tender,
grave, dazzlingly beautiful, and yet so good! This image effaced every
other. Did I not think of it alone? for I had always in the very depths
of my soul the music of your voice and the brightness of your eyes!"

She accepted with transports of joy these tributes of adoration to the
woman whom she could no longer claim to be. Frederick, becoming
intoxicated with his own words, came to believe himself in the reality
of what he said. Madame Arnoux, with her back turned to the light of the
lamp, stooped towards him. He felt the caress of her breath on his
forehead, and the undefined touch of her entire body through the
garments that kept them apart. Their hands were clasped; the tip of her
boot peeped out from beneath her gown, and he said to her, as if ready
to faint:

"The sight of your foot makes me lose my self-possession."

An impulse of modesty made her rise. Then, without any further movement,
she said, with the strange intonation of a somnambulist:

"At my age!--he--Frederick! Ah! no woman has ever been loved as I have
been. No! Where is the use in being young? What do I care about them,
indeed? I despise them--all those women who come here!"

"Oh! very few women come to this place," he returned, in a complaisant
fashion.

Her face brightened up, and then she asked him whether he meant to be
married.

He swore that he never would.

"Are you perfectly sure? Why should you not?"

"'Tis on your account!" said Frederick, clasping her in his arms.

She remained thus pressed to his heart, with her head thrown back, her
lips parted, and her eyes raised. Suddenly she pushed him away from her
with a look of despair, and when he implored of her to say something to
him in reply, she bent forward and whispered:

"I would have liked to make you happy!"

Frederick had a suspicion