ine intellect can ever hope to possess; that
accounts for their presentiments, less rare and more certain than ours. It
seems as though their sensibility, always strained and vibrating, might be
warned by mysterious currents of divine instinct, and that it guesses even
before it can understand. Clotilde, when Monsieur de Lucan was announced,
was, as it were, struck by one of these secret electric thrills, and in
spite of all the objections to the contrary that beset her mind, she felt
that she was loved, and that she was on the point of being told so. She
sat down in her great arm-chair, drawing up with both hands the silk of
her dress, with the gesture of a bird that flaps its wings. Lucan's
visible agitation further enlightened and delighted her. In such men,
armed with powerful but sternly restrained passions, accustomed to control
their own feelings, intrepid and calm, agitation is either frightful or
charming.

After informing her--which was entirely useless--that his visit to her was
one of unusual importance:

"Madam," he added, "the request I am about to address you demands, I know,
a well-matured answer. I will therefore beg of you not to give that answer
to-day, the more so that it would indeed be painful to me to hear it from
your own lips if it where not a favorable one."

"Mon Dieu! monsieur!" said Clotilde faintly.

"The baroness, your mother, madam, whom I had the pleasure of seeing
during the day, was kind enough to hold out some encouragement to me--in a
measure--and to permit me to hope that you might entertain some esteem for
me, or at least that you had no prejudice against me. As to myself madam,
I--mon Dieu! I love you, in a word, and I cannot imagine a greater
happiness in the world than that which I would hold at your hands. You
have known me for a long time; I have nothing to tell you concerning
myself. And now, I shall wait."

She detained him with a sign of her hand, and tried to speak; but her eyes
filled with tears. She hid her face in her hands, and she murmured:

"Excuse me! I have been so rarely happy! I don't know what it is!"

Lucan got gently down upon his knees before her, and when their eyes met,
their two hearts suddenly filled like two cups.

"Speak, my friend!" she resumed. "Tell me again that you love me. I was so
far from thinking it! And why is it? And since when?"

He explained to her his mistake, his painful struggle between his love for
her and his friendship for Pi