up everything for you, take me
away. If you like, take me as a toy, but let me be near you until you
break me."

"You will have no regrets?"

"Not one"! she said, letting him read her eyes, whose golden tint was
pure and clear.

"Am I the favored one?" said Henri to himself. If he suspected the
truth, he was ready at that time to pardon the offence in view of a love
so single minded. "I shall soon see," he thought.

If Paquita owed him no account of the past, yet the least recollection
of it became in his eyes a crime. He had therefore the sombre strength
to withhold a portion of his thought, to study her, even while
abandoning himself to the most enticing pleasures that ever peri
descended from the skies had devised for her beloved.

Paquita seemed to have been created for love by a particular effort of
nature. In a night her feminine genius had made the most rapid progress.
Whatever might be the power of this young man, and his indifference in
the matter of pleasures, in spite of his satiety of the previous night,
he found in the girl with the golden eyes that seraglio which a loving
woman knows how to create and which a man never refuses. Paquita
responded to that passion which is felt by all really great men for the
infinite--that mysterious passion so dramatically expressed in Faust, so
poetically translated in Manfred, and which urged Don Juan to search
the heart of women, in his hope to find there that limitless thought in
pursuit of which so many hunters after spectres have started, which wise
men think to discover in science, and which mystics find in God alone.
The hope of possessing at last the ideal being with whom the struggle
could be constant and tireless ravished De Marsay, who, for the first
time for long, opened his heart. His nerves expanded, his coldness was
dissipated in the atmosphere of that ardent soul, his hard and fast
theories melted away, and happiness colored his existence to the tint of
the rose and white boudoir. Experiencing the sting of a higher pleasure,
he was carried beyond the limits within which he had hitherto confined
passion. He would not be surpassed by this girl, whom a somewhat
artificial love had formed all ready for the needs of his soul, and then
he found in that vanity which urges a man to be in all things a victor,
strength enough to tame the girl; but, at the same time, urged beyond
that line where the soul is mistress over herself, he lost himself
in these delicio