on his
face as in a book; she learns every quiver of its muscles, she knows
whence comes its calmness, she asks herself the reason of the slightest
sadness, seeking to know if haply the cause is in herself; she studies
the eyes; for her the eyes are tinted with the dominant thought,--they
love or they do not love. Calyste knew himself to be the object of
so deep, so naive, so jealous a worship that he doubted his power to
compose a cautious face that should not betray the change in his moral
being.

"How shall I manage to-morrow morning?" he said to himself as he went
to sleep, dreading the sort of inspection to which Sabine would have
recourse. When they came together at night, and sometimes during the
day, Sabine would ask him, "Do you still love me?" or, "I don't weary
you, do I?" Charming interrogations, varied according to the nature or
the cleverness of women, which hide their anxieties either feigned or
real.

To the surface of the noblest and purest hearts the mud and slime cast
up by hurricanes must come. So on that morrow morning, Calyste, who
certainly loved his child, quivered with joy on learning that Sabine
feared the croup, and was watching for the cause of slight convulsions,
not daring to leave her little boy. The baron made a pretext of business
and went out, thus avoiding the home breakfast. He escaped as prisoners
escape, happy in being afoot, and free to go by the Pont Louis XVI.
and the Champs Elysees to a cafe on the boulevard where he had liked to
breakfast when he was a bachelor.

What is there in love? Does Nature rebel against the social yoke? Does
she need that impulse of her given life to be spontaneous, free, the
dash of an impetuous torrent foaming against rocks of opposition and of
coquetry, rather than a tranquil stream flowing between the two banks
of the church and the legal ceremony? Has she her own designs as she
secretly prepares those volcanic eruptions to which, perhaps, we owe
great men?

It would be difficult to find a young man more sacredly brought up than
Calyste, of purer morals, less stained by irreligion; and yet he bounded
toward a woman unworthy of him, when a benign and radiant chance
had given him for his wife a young creature whose beauty was truly
aristocratic, whose mind was keen and delicate, a pious, loving girl,
attached singly to him, of angelic sweetness, and made more tender still
by love, a love that was passionate in spite of marriage, like his
for Be