Ah, well! this love was her fate, and Helene ceased to resist.  She could battle no longer against her feelings.  And in ceasing to struggle she tasted immeasurable delight.  Why should she grudge herself happiness any longer?  The memory of her past life inspired her with disgust and aversion.  How had she been able to drag on that cold, dreary existence, of which she was formerly so proud?  A vision rose before her of herself as a young girl living in the Rue des Petites-Maries, at Marseilles, where she had ever shivered; she saw herself a wife, her heart’s blood frozen in the companionship of a big child of a husband, with little to take any interest in, apart from the cares of her household; she saw herself through every hour of her life following the same path with the same even tread, without a trouble to mar her peace; and now this monotony in which she had lived, her heart fast asleep, enraged her beyond expression.  To think that she had fancied herself happy in thus following her path for thirty years, her passions silent, with naught but the pride of virtue to fill the blank in her existence.  How she had cheated herself with her integrity and nice honor, which had girt her round with the empty joys of piety!  No, no; she had had enough of it; she wished to live!  And an awful spirit of ridicule woke within her as she thought of the behests of reason.  Her reason, forsooth! she felt a contemptuous pity for it; during all the years she had lived it had brought her no joy to be compared with that she had tasted during the past hour.  She had denied the possibility of stumbling, she had been vain and idiotic enough to think that she would go on to the end without her foot once tripping against a stone.  Ah, well! to-day she almost longed to fall.  Oh that she might disappear, after tasting for one moment the happiness which she had never enjoyed!

Within her soul, however, a great sorrow lingered, a heart-burning and a consciousness of a gloomy blank.  Then argument rose to her lips.  Was she not free?  In her love for Henri she deceived nobody; she could deal as she pleased with her love.  Then, did not everything exculpate her?  What had been her life for nearly two years?  Her widowhood, her unrestricted liberty, her loneliness—­everything, she realized, had softened and prepared her for love.  Love must have been smouldering within her during the long evenings spent between her two old friends, the Abbe and his brother, those simple hearts whose serenity had lulled it to rest; it had been growing whilst she remained shut up within those narrow walls, far away from the world, and gazed on Paris rumbling noisily on the horizon; it had been growing even when she leaned from that window in the dreamy mood which she had scarce been conscious of, but which little by little had rendered her so weak.  And a recollection came to her of that radiant spring morning when Paris had shone out fair and clear, as though in a glass mirror, when it had worn the pure, sunny hue of childhood,