the power of an infernal genius?"

"Infernal," she repeated.

"But how, then, were you able to get out?"

"Ah!" she said, "that was my ruin. I drove Dona Concha to choose between
the fear of immediate death and anger to be. I had the curiosity of
a demon, I wished to break the bronze circle which they had described
between creation and me, I wished to see what young people were like,
for I knew nothing of man except the Marquis and Cristemio. Our coachman
and the lackey who accompanies us are old men...."

"But you were not always thus shut up? Your health...?"

"Ah," she answered, "we used to walk, but it was at night and in the
country, by the side of the Seine, away from people."

"Are you not proud of being loved like that?"

"No," she said, "no longer. However full it be, this hidden life is but
darkness in comparison with the light."

"What do you call the light?"

"Thee, my lovely Adolphe! Thee, for whom I would give my life. All the
passionate things that have been told me, and that I have inspired, I
feel for thee! For a certain time I understood nothing of existence, but
now I know what love is, and hitherto I have been the loved one only;
for myself, I did not love. I would give up everything for you, take me
away. If you like, take me as a toy, but let me be near you until you
break me."

"You will have no regrets?"

"Not one"! she said, letting him read her eyes, whose golden tint was
pure and clear.

"Am I the favored one?" said Henri to himself. If he suspected the
truth, he was ready at that time to pardon the offence in view of a love
so single minded. "I shall soon see," he thought.

If Paquita owed him no account of the past, yet the least recollection
of it became in his eyes a crime. He had therefore the sombre strength
to withhold a portion of his thought, to study her, even while
abandoning himself to the most enticing pleasures that ever peri
descended from the skies had devised for her beloved.

Paquita seemed to have been created for love by a particular effort of
nature. In a night her feminine genius had made the most rapid progress.
Whatever might be the power of this young man, and his indifference in
the matter of pleasures, in spite of his satiety of the previous night,
he found in the girl with the golden eyes that seraglio which a loving
woman knows how to create and which a man never refuses. Paquita
responded to that passion which is felt by all really great men for t