from them, which stirred his soul. He recognized many
that he had carried about on his person for whole weeks, and found
again, throughout the delicate handwriting that said such sweet things
to him, the forgotten emotions of early days. Suddenly he found under
his fingers a fine embroidered handkerchief. What was that? He pondered
a few minutes, then he remembered! One day, at his house, she had
wept because she was a little jealous, and he had stolen and kept her
handkerchief, moist with her tears!

Ah, what sad things! What sad things! The poor woman!

From the depths of that drawer, from the depths of his past, all these
reminiscences rose like a vapor, but it was only the impalpable vapor of
a reality now dead. Nevertheless, he suffered and wept over the letters,
as one weeps over the dead because they are no more.

But the remembrance of all his early love awakened in him a new and
youthful ardor, a wave of irresistible tenderness which called up in
his mind the radiant face of Annette. He had loved the mother, through a
passionate impulse of voluntary servitude; he was beginning to love
this little girl like a slave, a trembling old slave on whom fetters
are riveted that he never can break. He felt this in the depths of
his being, and was terrified. He tried to understand how and why she
possessed him thus. He knew her so little! She was hardly a woman as
yet; her heart and soul still slept with the sleep of youth.

He, on the other hand, was now almost at the end of his life. How, then,
had this child been able to capture him with a few smiles and locks of
her hair? Ah, the smiles, the hair of that little blonde maiden made him
long to fall on his knees and strike the dust with his head!

Does one know, does one ever know why a woman's face has suddenly the
power of poison upon us? It seems as if one had been drinking her with
the eyes, that she had become one's mind and body. We are intoxicated
with her, mad over her; we live of that absorbed image and would die of
it!

How one suffers sometimes from this ferocious and incomprehensible power
of a certain face on a man's heart!

Olivier Bertin began to pace his room again; night was advancing, his
fire had gone out. Through the window-panes the cold air penetrated
from outside. Then he went back to bed, where he continued to think and
suffer until daylight.

He rose early, without knowing why, nor what he was going to do,
agitated by his nervousness, ir