moral solitude of to-day. You see, I came to your home with so much joy,
because I was free, because each time I could say to myself that I need
not return again. Such a confession is not romantic. But it is thus. If
that relation became a bond, an obligation, a fixed framework in which
to move, a circle of habits in which to imprison me, I should only have
one thought--flight. An engagement for my entire life? No, no, I could
not bear it. There are souls of passage as well as birds of passage, and
I am one. You will understand it tomorrow, now, and you will remember
that I have spoken to you as a man of honor, who would be miserable if
he thought he had augmented, involuntarily, the sorrows of your life
when his only desire was to assuage them. My God! What is to be done?"
he cried, on seeing, as he spoke, tears gush from the young girl's eyes,
which she did not wipe away.

"Go away," she replied, "leave me. I do not want you. I am grateful to
you for not having deceived me."

"But your presence is too cruel. I am ashamed of having spoken to you,
now that I know you do not love me. I have been mad, do not punish me by
remaining longer. After the conversation we have just had, my honor will
not permit us to talk longer."

"You are right," said Julien, after another pause. He took his hat,
which he had placed upon a table at the beginning of that visit,
so rapidly and abruptly terminated by a confession of sentiments so
strange. He said:

"Then, farewell." She inclined her fair head without replying.

The door was closed. Alba Steno was again alone. Half an hour later,
when the footman entered to ask for orders relative to the carriage sent
back by the Countess, he found her standing motionless at the window
from which she had watched Dorsenne depart. There she had once more
been seized by the temptation of suicide. She had again felt with an
irresistible force the magnetic attraction of death. Life appeared to
her once more as something too vile, too useless, too insupportable to
be borne. The carriage was at her disposal. By way of the Portese gate
and along the Tiber, with the Countess's horses, it would take an hour
and a half to reach the Lake di Porto. She had, too, this pretext, to
avoid the curiosity of the servants: one of the Roman noblewomen of her
acquaintance, Princess Torlonia, owned an isolated villa on the border
of that lake.... She ascended hastily to don her hat. And without
writing a word of far