nt energy, for they came
above all from my overwrought nerves. My mind saw clear and rent my
remorse like a superfluous veil.

No, I was not responsible! Our thought, once expressed, no longer
belongs to us. Whether it leave us when scarce ripe, because an accident
has gathered it, or whether it fall in its season, like the leaf
falling from the tree, we know nothing of what it will become; and it is
at once the wretchedness and the greatness of human thought to be
subjected to the infinite forms of every mind and of every existence.

I walked for a long time without heeding the hour. The sky was clear and
the stars glowed in its depths like live things; in the distance, the
Trocadero decked the night with brilliants.

And, little by little, hope returned to me. I was persuaded that over
there, in the little room which my care had provided for Rose, love
would yet be the conqueror. She would awaken under those kisses. My
Roseline should yet know passion and rapture. Love would triumph. It
would do what I had been unable to do, it would breathe life into
beauty! And, in the dead stillness, I kept hearing the kisses falling,
falling heavily, like the first drops of a storm.

CHAPTER XI

1

We are talking like old friends, he and I, in the little white bedroom.
Through the two curtains of the window high up in the wall a great ray
of sunshine falls, a column of dancing light that dies on the table
between us. I sit drumming absent-mindedly with my fingers in the
shimmering motes. He looks at me and I feel no need to speak or to turn
my head. The novelty of his presence makes no impression on me beyond a
feeling of surprise that I do not find it strange. When by chance we do
not hold the same view, the difference of opinion lasts only long enough
to shift the thought which we are considering, even as one shifts an
object to see its different aspects one after the other.

I came to the boarding-house this morning to see Rose. Her room was
empty. I was on the point of going, when the young man passed. He
recognised me, doubtless from the portraits which Rose had shown him;
and he came up to me of his own accord. His greeting was frank and
natural. There were breadth and spaciousness in his eyes and his smile
as well as in his manner. To justify my friendly interest, I pretended
to have heard about him from Rose as he himself had heard about me: that
is to say, with the most circumstantial details regarding pos