Calyste, sitting on a stool, answered only by motions of the head, and rare monosyllables when spoken to; Camille’s uneasiness, roused for Beatrix, was still further excited by Calyste’s unnatural condition.  When the physician arrived, and Beatrix was bled, she felt better, began to talk, and consented to embark; so that by five o’clock they reached the jetty at Guerande, whence she was carried to Les Touches.  The news of the accident had already spread through that lonely and almost uninhabited region with incredible rapidity.

Calyste passed the night at Les Touches, sitting at the foot of Beatrix’s bed, in company with Camille.  The doctor from Guerande had assured them that on the following day a little stiffness would be all that remained of the accident.  Across the despair of Calyste’s heart there came a gleam of joy.  He was there, at her feet; he could watch her sleeping or waking; he might study her pallid face and all its expressions.  Camille smiled bitterly as her keen mind recognized in Calyste the symptoms of a passion such as man can feel but once,—­a passion which dyes his soul and his faculties by mingling with the fountain of his life at a period when neither thoughts nor cares distract or oppose the inward working of this emotion.  She saw that Calyste would never, could never see the real woman that was in Beatrix.

And with what guileless innocence the young Breton allowed his thoughts to be read!  When he saw the beautiful green eyes of the sick woman turned to him, expressing a mixture of love, confusion, and even mischief, he colored, and turned away his head.

“Did I not say truly, Calyste, that you men promised happiness, and ended by flinging us down a precipice?”

When he heard this little jest, said in sweet, caressing tones which betrayed a change of heart in Beatrix, Calyste knelt down, took her moist hand which she yielded to him, and kissed it humbly.

“You have the right to reject my love forever,” he said, “and I, I have no right to say one word to you.”

“Ah!” cried Camille, seeing the expression on Beatrix’s face and comparing it with that obtained by her diplomacy, “love has a wit of its own, wiser than that of all the world!  Take your composing-draught, my dear friend, and go to sleep.”

That night, spent by Calyste beside Mademoiselle des Touches, who read a book of theological mysticism while Calyste read “Indiana,”—­the first work of Camille’s celebrated rival, in which is the captivating image of a young man loving with idolatry and devotion, with mysterious tranquillity and for all his life, a woman placed in the same false position as Beatrix (a book which had a fatal influence upon him),—­that night left ineffaceable marks upon the heart of the poor young fellow, whom Felicite soothed with the assurance that unless a woman were a monster she must be flattered in all her vanities by being the object of such a crime.