id I ever know you?"

She replied, weeping:

"I do not regret having known you. I am dying of it, and I do not regret
it. I have loved."

He stubbornly continued to make her suffer. He felt that he was playing
an odious part, but he could not stop.

"It is possible, after all, that you have loved me too."

She answered, with soft bitterness:

"But I have loved only you. I have loved you too much. And it is for that
you are punishing me. Oh, can you think that I was to another what I have
been to you?"

"Why not?"

She looked at him without force and without courage.

"It is true that you do not believe me."

She added softly:

"If I killed myself would you believe me?"

"No, I would not believe you."

She wiped her cheeks with her handkerchief; then, lifting her eyes,
shining through her tears, she said:

"Then, all is at an end!"

She rose, saw again in the room the thousand things with which she had
lived in laughing intimacy, which she had regarded as hers, now suddenly
become nothing to her, and confronting her as a stranger and an enemy.
She saw again the nude woman who made, while running, the gesture which
had not been explained to her; the Florentine models which recalled to
her Fiesole and the enchanted hours of Italy; the profile sketch by
Dechartre of the girl who laughed in her pretty pathetic thinness. She
stopped a moment sympathetically in front of that little newspaper girl
who had come there too, and had disappeared, carried away in the
irresistible current of life and of events.

She repeated:

"Then all is at an end?"

He remained silent.

The twilight made the room dim.

"What will become of me?" she asked.

"And what will become of me?" he replied.

They looked at each other with sympathy, because each was moved with
self-pity.

Therese said again:

"And I, who feared to grow old in your eyes, for fear our beautiful love
should end! It would have been better if it had never come. Yes, it would
be better if I had not been born. What a presentiment was that which came
to me, when a child, under the lindens of Joinville, before the marble
nymphs! I wished to die then."

Her arms fell, and clasping her hands she lifted her eyes; her wet glance
threw a light in the shadows.

"Is there not a way of my making you feel that what I am saying to you is
true? That never since I have been yours, never--But how could I? The
very idea of it seems horrible, absurd. Do you know