erve you
with the same devotion that he has for me, if I so instruct him."

She waited for a word of recognition, and went on with an accent replete
with tenderness:

"Adolphe, give me then one kind word!... It is nearly day."

Henri did not answer. The young man had one sorry quality, for one
considers as something great everything which resembles strength, and
often men invent extravagances. Henri knew not how to pardon. That
_returning upon itself_ which is one of the soul's graces, was a
non-existent sense for him. The ferocity of the Northern man, with which
the English blood is deeply tainted, had been transmitted to him by his
father. He was inexorable both in his good and evil impulses. Paquita's
exclamation had been all the more horrible to him, in that it had
dethroned him from the sweetest triumph which had ever flattered his
man's vanity. Hope, love, and every emotion had been exalted with him,
all had lit up within his heart and his intelligence, then these torches
illuminating his life had been extinguished by a cold wind. Paquita, in
her stupefaction of grief, had only strength enough to give the signal
for departure.

"What is the use of that!" she said, throwing away the bandage. "If he
does not love me, if he hates me, it is all over."

She waited for one look, did not obtain it, and fell, half dead. The
mulatto cast a glance at Henri, so horribly significant, that, for the
first time in his life, the young man, to whom no one denied the gift of
rare courage, trembled. "_If you do not love her well, if you give her
the least pain, I will kill you_." such was the sense of that brief
gaze. De Marsay was escorted, with a care almost obsequious, along the
dimly lit corridor, at the end of which he issued by a secret door into
the garden of the Hotel San-Real. The mulatto made him walk cautiously
through an avenue of lime trees, which led to a little gate opening upon
a street which was at that hour deserted. De Marsay took a keen notice
of everything. The carriage awaited him. This time the mulatto did not
accompany him, and at the moment when Henri put his head out of the
window to look once more at the gardens of the hotel, he encountered the
white eyes of Cristemio, with whom he exchanged a glance. On either side
there was a provocation, a challenge, the declaration of a savage
war, of a duel in which ordinary laws were invalid, where treason and
treachery were admitted means. Cristemio knew that H