d living, as if they were her life's
blood. One question above all others had troubled her since the early
morning, and had grieved her deeply. Was she right in having sent away
Felicien in despair, stabbed to the heart by her coldness, and with the
thought that she did not love him? She knew that she did love him, yet
she had willingly caused him to suffer, and now in her turn she was
suffering intensely. Why should there be so much pain connected with
love? Did the saints wish for tears? Could it be that Agnes, her
guardian angel, was angry in the knowledge that she was happy? Now, for
the first time, she was distracted by a doubt. Before this, whenever she
thought of the hero she awaited, and who must come sooner or later, she
had arranged everything much more satisfactorily. When the right time
arrived he was to enter her very room, where she would immediately
recognise and welcome him, when they would both go away together, to
be united for evermore. But how different was the reality! He had
come, and, instead of what she had foreseen, their meeting was most
unsatisfactory; they were equally unhappy, and were eternally separated.
To what purpose? Why had this result come to pass? Who had exacted from
her so strange a vow, that, although he might be very dear to her, she
was never to let him know it?

But, yet again, Angelique was especially grieved from the fear that she
might have been bad and done some very wrong thing. Perhaps the original
sin that was in her had manifested itself again as when she was a little
girl! She thought over all her acts of pretended indifference: the
mocking air with which she had received Felicien, and the malicious
pleasure she took in giving him a false idea of herself. And the
astonishment at what she had done, added to a cutting remorse for her
cruelty, increased her distress. Now, her whole heart was filled with a
deep infinite pity for the suffering she had caused him without really
meaning to do so.

She saw him constantly before her, as he was when he left the house in
the morning: the despairing expression of his face, his troubled eyes,
his trembling lips; and in imagination she followed him through the
streets, as he went home, pale, utterly desolate, and wounded to the
heart's core by her. Where was he now? Perhaps at this hour he was
really ill!

She wrung her hands in agony, distressed that she could not at once
repair the evil she had done. Ah! how she revolted at th