s an Oriental poem, in which shone the sun that Saadi, that Hafiz,
have set in their pulsing strophes. Only, neither the rhythm of Saadi,
nor that of Pindar, could have expressed the ecstasy--full of confusion
and stupefaction--which seized the delicious girl when the error in
which an iron hand had caused her to live was at an end.

"Dead!" she said, "I am dead, Adolphe! Take me away to the world's
end, to an island where no one knows us. Let there be no traces of our
flight! We should be followed to the gates of hell. God! here is the
day! Escape! Shall I ever see you again? Yes, to-morrow I will see
you, if I have to deal death to all my warders to have that joy. Till
to-morrow."

She pressed him in her arms with an embrace in which the terror of death
mingled. Then she touched a spring, which must have been in connection
with a bell, and implored De Marsay to permit his eyes to be bandaged.

"And if I would not--and if I wished to stay here?"

"You would be the death of me more speedily," she said, "for now I know
I am certain to die on your account."

Henri submitted. In the man who had just gorged himself with pleasure
there occurs a propensity to forgetfulness, I know not what ingratitude,
a desire for liberty, a whim to go elsewhere, a tinge of contempt and,
perhaps, of disgust for his idol; in fine, indescribable sentiments
which render him ignoble and ashamed. The certainty of this confused,
but real, feeling in souls who are not illuminated by that celestial
light, nor perfumed with that holy essence from which the performance
of sentiment springs, doubtless suggested to Rousseau the adventures of
Lord Edward, which conclude the letters of the _Nouvelle Heloise_. If
Rousseau is obviously inspired by the work of Richardson, he departs
from it in a thousand details, which leave his achievement magnificently
original; he has recommended it to posterity by great ideas which it is
difficult to liberate by analysis, when, in one's youth, one reads this
work with the object of finding in it the lurid representation of the
most physical of our feelings, whereas serious and philosophical writers
never employ its images except as the consequence or the corollary of
a vast thought; and the adventures of Lord Edward are one of the most
Europeanly delicate ideas of the whole work.

Henri, therefore, found himself beneath the domination of that confused
sentiment which is unknown to true love. There was needful, in
s