woman's bonnet and wrapped a shawl round him. Abandoning herself to
these follies with a child's innocence, she laughed a convulsive laugh,
and resembled some bird flapping its wings; but he saw nothing beyond.

If it be impossible to paint the unheard-of delights which these two
creatures--made by heaven in a joyous moment--found, it is perhaps
necessary to translate metaphysically the extraordinary and almost
fantastic impressions of the young man. That which persons in the social
position of De Marsay, living as he lived, are best able to recognize is
a girl's innocence. But, strange phenomenon! The girl of the golden eyes
might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic
union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and
beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been
met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime
being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most
refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses
which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this
girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they
made.

She was an Oriental poem, in which shone the sun that Saadi, that Hafiz,
have set in their pulsing strophes. Only, neither the rhythm of Saadi,
nor that of Pindar, could have expressed the ecstasy--full of confusion
and stupefaction--which seized the delicious girl when the error in
which an iron hand had caused her to live was at an end.

"Dead!" she said, "I am dead, Adolphe! Take me away to the world's
end, to an island where no one knows us. Let there be no traces of our
flight! We should be followed to the gates of hell. God! here is the
day! Escape! Shall I ever see you again? Yes, to-morrow I will see
you, if I have to deal death to all my warders to have that joy. Till
to-morrow."

She pressed him in her arms with an embrace in which the terror of death
mingled. Then she touched a spring, which must have been in connection
with a bell, and implored De Marsay to permit his eyes to be bandaged.

"And if I would not--and if I wished to stay here?"

"You would be the death of me more speedily," she said, "for now I know
I am certain to die on your account."

Henri submitted. In the man who had just gorged himself with pleasure
there occurs a propensity to forgetfulness, I know not what ingratitude,
a desire for liberty,