hey were lovers, and offered
flowers to them. He bought a two-sous' bouquet and offered it to
Therese.

She was walking toward the cathedral. She was thinking: "It is like an
enormous beast--a beast of the Apocalypse."

At the other end of the bridge a flower-woman, wrinkled, bearded, gray
with years and dust, followed them with her basket full of mimosas and
roses. Therese, who held her violets and was trying to slip them into
her waist, said, joyfully:

"Thank you, I have some."

"One can see that you are young," the old woman shouted with a wicked
air, as she went away.

Therese understood at once, and a smile came to her lips and eyes. They
were passing near the porch, before the stone figures that wear sceptres
and crowns.

"Let us go in," she said.

He did not wish to go in. He declared that the door was closed. She
pushed it, and slipped into the immense nave, where the inanimate trees
of the columns ascended in darkness. In the rear, candles were moving
in front of spectre-like priests, under the last reverberations of the
organs. She trembled in the silence, and said:

"The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur
of nothingness."

He replied:

"We must believe in something. If there were no God, if our souls were
not immortal, it would be too sad."

She remained for a while immovable under the curtains of shadow hanging
from the arches. Then she said:

"My poor friend, we do not know what to do with this life, which is so
short, and yet you desire another life which shall never finish."

In the carriage that took them back he said gayly that he had passed a
fine afternoon. He kissed her, satisfied with her and with himself. But
his good-humor was not communicated to her. The last moments they passed
together were spoiled for her always by the presentiment that he would
not say at parting the thing that he should say. Ordinarily, he quitted
her brusquely, as if what had happened were not to last. At every one
of their partings she had a confused feeling that they were parting
forever. She suffered from this in advance and became irritable.

Under the trees he took her hand and kissed her.

"Is it not rare, Therese, to love as we love each other?"

"Rare? I don't know; but I think that you love me."

"And you?"

"I, too, love you."

"And you will love me always?"

"What does one ever know?"

And seeing the face of her lover darken:

"Would you be more cont