ave too little
opium to La Concha. She might wake up, and I should be lost. At this
moment the whole household believes me to be asleep in my room. In two
days be at the same spot, say the same word to the same man. That man is
my foster-father. Cristemio worships me, and would die in torments for
me before they could extract one word against me from him. Farewell,"
she said seizing Henri by the waist and twining round him like a
serpent.

She pressed him on every side at once, lifted her head to his, and
offered him her lips, then snatched a kiss which filled them both with
such a dizziness that it seemed to Henri as though the earth opened; and
Paquita cried: "Enough, depart!" in a voice which told how little
she was mistress of herself. But she clung to him still, still crying
"Depart!" and brought him slowly to the staircase. There the mulatto,
whose white eyes lit up at the sight of Paquita, took the torch from the
hands of his idol, and conducted Henri to the street. He left the light
under the arch, opened the door, put Henri into the carriage, and set
him down on the Boulevard des Italiens with marvelous rapidity. It was
as though the horses had hell-fire in their veins.

The scene was like a dream to De Marsay, but one of those dreams
which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural
voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life.
A single kiss had been enough. Never had _rendezvous_ been spent in a
manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of
which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous
divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some
infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious,
which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet conceived. In
effect, no _rendezvous_ had ever irritated his senses more, revealed
more audacious pleasures, or better aroused love from its centre to
shed itself round him like an atmosphere. There was something sombre,
mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained, and expansive, an intermingling
of the awful and the celestial, of paradise and hell, which made De
Marsay like a drunken man.

He was no longer himself, and he was, withal, great enough to be able to
resist the intoxication of pleasure.

In order to render his conduct intelligible in the catastrophe of this
story, it is needful to explain how his soul had broadened at an age
when youn