f affection....

Sadly I think of all those who are weeping, weeping over like sorrows.
There are other wounded hearts bleeding in mine; my memory echoes with
the mournful prayers of the poor deluded victims of love. Alas, we are
all subject to the cruel and exquisite law that absorbs the firmest
wills in its indifferent strength!

I feel Roseline's hands quivering under my fingers, but I dare not
speak. The silence of the fields and the solemn darkness awe me. Do not
our least words seem to be written on the velvet of the night in
precious and lasting letters?...

3

At last, I wiped away her tears and long and gently tried to rally her.
But, suddenly drawing herself up, Rose cried:

"I don't understand you, I no longer understand you! What you are saying
is just so much more silence and I wait for your judgment in vain! You
have, you must have, an opinion on what I have done. The reason why I
hesitated so long to confess my fault was because I knew instinctively
that you would blame me; and now I feel you so far from me.... Please
judge me, be angry with me: it will be easier for you to forgive me
afterwards!..."

I do not know why this blind insistence offended me. Until then I had
remained calm; but at her words there burst from the depths of my being
the voice of instinct, that voice which I had tried to stifle, almost
unconsciously, by force of habit and training.... Oh, that blatant,
piercing voice! It seemed to me to rend the darkness, to scoff at my
heart and my sweet reasonableness! It was as though I saw all my kindly
dreams of tolerance and indulgence fly into a thousand splinters! Never
had I so clearly realised their brittleness. My anger was all the
greater because it was still trammelled by fragments of my reason.

I placed my hands on her shoulders and shouted close to her face, which
my eyes could not distinguish:

"Why, why will you rouse my instinct, my nerves, all those things which
should never interfere in our judgments and beyond which we should try
to look if we would understand the actions of others? You give the name
of silence to the words spoken by my reason and you wish to be judged by
a blind and senseless power! But that idiot power mercilessly condemns
all the faults committed in its name! That power, which is making me
tremble now with excitement, will tell you that you could have done
nothing worse! Do you understand? Nothing, nothing! And it will
overwhelm you with reproac