st I do? must I stay away?"
asked Calyste, with difficulty restraining his tears, one of which
rolled down his cheek and touched Felicite deeply.

"You are an angel!" she cried. Then she gaily sang the "Stay! stay!" of
Matilde in "Guillaume Tell," taking all gravity from that magnificent
answer of the princess to her subject. "He only wants to make me think
he loves me better than he really does," she said. "He knows how much
I desire his happiness," she went on, looking attentively at Calyste.
"Perhaps he feels humiliated to be inferior to me there. Perhaps he
has suspicions about you and means to surprise us. But even if his only
crime is to take his pleasure without me, and not to associate me with
the ideas this new place gives him, is not that enough? Ah! I am no more
loved by that great brain than I was by the musician, by the poet,
by the soldier! Sterne is right; names signify much; mine is a bitter
sarcasm. I shall die without finding in any man the love which fills my
heart, the poesy that I have in my soul--"

She stopped, her arms pendant, her head lying back on the cushions, her
eyes, stupid with thought, fixed on a pattern of the carpet. The pain of
great minds has something grandiose and imposing about it; it reveals
a vast extent of soul which the thought of the spectator extends still
further. Such souls share the privileges of royalty whose affections
belong to a people and so affect a world.

"Why did you reject my--" said Calyste; but he could not end his
sentence. Camille's beautiful hand laid upon his eloquently interrupted
him.

"Nature changed her laws in granting me a dozen years of youth beyond my
due," she said. "I rejected your love from egotism. Sooner or later the
difference in our ages must have parted us. I am thirteen years older
than _he_, and even that is too much."

"You will be beautiful at sixty," cried Calyste, heroically.

"God grant it," she answered, smiling. "Besides, dear child, I _want_ to
love. In spite of his cold heart, his lack of imagination, his cowardly
indifference, and the envy which consumes him, I believe there is
greatness behind those tatters; I hope to galvanize that heart, to save
him from himself, to attach him to me. Alas! alas! I have a clear-seeing
mind, but a blind heart."

She was terrible in her knowledge of herself. She suffered and analyzed
her feelings as Cuvier and Dupuytren explained to friends the fatal
advance of their disease and the prog