Was
this strained condition the effect of a want of faith, or was it only a
memory of their nocturnal scene? They did not know themselves. But they
loved each other so purely that the impression of that scene, both cruel
and beneficent, could not fail to leave its traces in their souls; both
were eager to make those traces disappear, each striving to be the first
to return to the other, and thus they could not fail to think of the
cause of their first variance. To loving souls, this is not grief; pain
is still far-off; but it is a sort of mourning, which is difficult to
depict. If there are, indeed, relations between colors and the emotions
of the soul, if, as Locke's blind man said, scarlet produces on the
sight the effect produced upon the hearing by a blast of trumpets, it is
permissible to compare this reaction of melancholy to mourning tones of
gray.

But even so, love saddened, love in which remains a true sentiment
of its happiness, momentarily troubled though it be, gives enjoyments
derived from pain and pleasure both, which are all novel. Jules studied
his wife's voice; he watched her glances with the freshness of feeling
that inspired him in the earliest days of his passion for her. The
memory of five absolutely happy years, her beauty, the candor of her
love, quickly effaced in her husband's mind the last vestiges of an
intolerable pain.

The day was Sunday,--a day on which there was no Bourse and no business
to be done. The reunited pair passed the whole day together, getting
farther into each other's hearts than they ever yet had done, like two
children who in a moment of fear, hold each other closely and cling
together, united by an instinct. There are in this life of two-in-one
completely happy days, the gift of chance, ephemeral flowers, born
neither of yesterday nor belonging to the morrow. Jules and Clemence
now enjoyed this day as though they forboded it to be the last of their
loving life. What name shall we give to that mysterious power which
hastens the steps of travellers before the storm is visible; which makes
the life and beauty of the dying so resplendent, and fills the parting
soul with joyous projects for days before death comes; which tells the
midnight student to fill his lamp when it shines brightest; and makes
the mother fear the thoughtful look cast upon her infant by an observing
man? We all are affected by this influence in the great catastrophes of
life; but it has never yet been n