I
had laid my life. I never expected that such harshness, perhaps I should
say, such rigid virtue, lurked in a heart that seemed to be so loving
and so tender. At this moment the full strength of my love is revealed
to me; it has survived the most terrible of all trials, the scorn you
have shown for me by severing without regret the ties that bound us.
Farewell for ever. There still remains to me the proud humility of
repentance; I will find some sphere of life where I can expiate the
errors to which you, the mediator between Heaven and me, have shown no
mercy. Perhaps God may be less inexorable. My sufferings, sufferings
full of the thought of you, shall be the penance of a heart which
will never be healed, which will bleed in solitude. For a wounded
heart--shadow and silence.

"'No other image of love shall be engraven on my heart. Though I am not
a woman, I feel as you felt that when I said "I love you," it was a vow
for life. Yes, the words then spoken in the ear of "my beloved" were
not a lie; you would have a right to scorn me if I could change. I shall
never cease to worship you in my solitude. In spite of the gulf set
between us, you will still be the mainspring of all my actions, and all
the virtues are inspired by penitence and love. Though you have filled
my heart with bitterness, I shall never have bitter thoughts of you;
would it not be an ill beginning of the new tasks that I have set myself
if I did not purge out all the evil leaven from my soul? Farewell, then,
to the one heart that I love in the world, a heart from which I am cast
out. Never has more feeling and more tenderness been expressed in a
farewell, for is it not fraught with the life and soul of one who can
never hope again, and must be henceforth as one dead?... Farewell. May
peace be with you, and may all the sorrow of our lot fall to me!'"

Benassis and Genestas looked at each other for a moment after reading
the two letters, each full of sad thoughts, of which neither spoke.

"As you see, this is only a rough copy of my last letter," said
Benassis; "it is all that remains to me to-day of my blighted hopes.
When I had sent the letter, I fell into an indescribable state of
depression. All the ties that hold one to life were bound together in
the hope of wedded happiness, which was henceforth lost to me for ever.
I had to bid farewell to the joys of a permitted and acknowledged love,
to all the generous ideas that had thronged up from t