voice, the other murmured:

"I have--I have a lover."

And, hiding her forehead on the shoulder of her younger sister, she
sobbed.

Then, when she had grown a little calmer, when the heaving of her breast
had subsided, she commenced to unbosom herself, as if to cast forth this
secret from herself, to empty this sorrow of hers into a sympathetic
heart.

Thereupon, holding each other's hands tightly clasped, the two women
went over to a sofa in a dark corner of the room, into which they sank,
and the younger sister, passing her arm over the elder one's neck, and
drawing her close to her heart, listened.

"Oh! I know that there was no excuse for me; I do not understand myself,
and since that day I feel as if I were mad. Be careful, my child, about
yourself--be careful! If you only knew how weak we are, how quickly we
yield, and fall. It takes so little, so little, so little, a moment of
tenderness, one of those sudden fits of melancholy which come over you,
one of those longings to open, your arms, to love, to cherish something,
which we all have at certain moments.

"You know my husband, and you know how fond I am of him; but he is
mature and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations
of a woman's heart. He is always the same, always good, always smiling,
always kind, always perfect. Oh! how I sometimes have wished that he
would clasp me roughly in his arms, that he would embrace me with those
slow, sweet kisses which make two beings intermingle, which are like
mute confidences! How I have wished that he were foolish, even weak, so
that he should have need of me, of my caresses, of my tears!

"This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that. How can we
help it?

"And yet the thought of deceiving him never entered my mind. Now it has
happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply because
the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.

"During the month when we were travelling together, my husband, with
his calm indifference, paralyzed my enthusiasm, extinguished my poetic
ardor. When we were descending the mountain paths at sunrise, when
as the four horses galloped along with the diligence, we saw, in the
transparent morning haze, valleys, woods, streams, and villages, I
clasped my hands with delight, and said to him: 'How beautiful it is,
dear! Give me a kiss! Kiss me now!' He only answered, with a smile of
chilling kindliness: 'There is no reason why we should ki