ious, whose nature was not bold, I had been, as it were, possessed
by a frenzy that no one who once felt it could condemn; that never heart
of man had been so filled with the passion which no being can resist,
which conquers all things, even death--

"And contempt?" she asked, stopping me.

"Did you despise me?" I exclaimed.

"Let us say no more on this subject," she replied.

"No, let me say all!" I replied, in the excitement of my intolerable
pain. "It concerns my life, my whole being, my inward self; it contains
a secret you must know or I must die in despair. It also concerns you,
who, unawares, are the lady in whose hand is the crown promised to the
victor in the tournament!"

Then I related to her my childhood and youth, not as I have told it to
you, judged from a distance, but in the language of a young man whose
wounds are still bleeding. My voice was like the axe of a woodsman
in the forest. At every word the dead years fell with echoing sound,
bristling with their anguish like branches robbed of their foliage. I
described to her in feverish language many cruel details which I have
here spared you. I spread before her the treasure of my radiant hopes,
the virgin gold of my desires, the whole of a burning heart kept alive
beneath the snow of these Alps, piled higher and higher by perpetual
winter. When, bowed down by the weight of these remembered sufferings,
related as with the live coal of Isaiah, I awaited the reply of the
woman who listened with a bowed head, she illumined the darkness with
a look, she quickened the worlds terrestrial and divine with a single
sentence.

"We have had the same childhood!" she said, turning to me a face on
which the halo of the martyrs shone.

After a pause, in which our souls were wedded in the one consoling
thought, "I am not alone in suffering," the countess told me, in the
voice she kept for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl when
sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter bound to
her mother's side differed from those of a boy cast out upon the world
of school and college life. My desolate neglect seemed to me a paradise
compared to that contact with a millstone under which her soul was
ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had saved her
from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now related
to me; misery caused sometimes by incessant faultfinding, always
intolerable to high-strung natures which do n