our soul and your forehead still keep this
cloud, however light it be, I tell you now that I shall die of it."

She could not repress a shudder, and turned pale.

"Oh! I will kill that man," thought Jules, as he lifted his wife in his
arms and carried her to her bed.

"Let us sleep in peace, my angel," he said. "I have forgotten all, I
swear it!"

Clemence fell asleep to the music of those sweet words, softly repeated.
Jules, as he watched her sleeping, said in his heart:--

"She is right; when love is so pure, suspicion blights it. To that young
soul, that tender flower, a blight--yes, a blight means death."

When a cloud comes between two beings filled with affection for each
other and whose lives are in absolute unison, that cloud, though it
may disperse, leaves in those souls a trace of its passage. Either
love gains a stronger life, as the earth after rain, or the shock still
echoes like distant thunder through a cloudless sky. It is impossible
to recover absolutely the former life; love will either increase or
diminish.

At breakfast, Monsieur and Madame Jules showed to each other those
particular attentions in which there is always something of affectation.
There were glances of forced gaiety, which seemed the efforts of persons
endeavoring to deceive themselves. Jules had involuntary doubts, his
wife had positive fears. Still, sure of each other, they had slept. Was
this strained condition the effect of a want of faith, or was it only a
memory of their nocturnal scene? They did not know themselves. But they
loved each other so purely that the impression of that scene, both cruel
and beneficent, could not fail to leave its traces in their souls; both
were eager to make those traces disappear, each striving to be the first
to return to the other, and thus they could not fail to think of the
cause of their first variance. To loving souls, this is not grief; pain
is still far-off; but it is a sort of mourning, which is difficult to
depict. If there are, indeed, relations between colors and the emotions
of the soul, if, as Locke's blind man said, scarlet produces on the
sight the effect produced upon the hearing by a blast of trumpets, it is
permissible to compare this reaction of melancholy to mourning tones of
gray.

But even so, love saddened, love in which remains a true sentiment
of its happiness, momentarily troubled though it be, gives enjoyments
derived from pain and pleasure both, which are all nove