have I said?” Instantly his face paled, his lips quivered; he felt his heart beat tumultuously and his throat pressed by painful constriction.  “But nothing is the matter,” she answered, looking at him tenderly.  “You have said nothing.”  To come to the point, why should he have spoken?  During his frightful dreams, his nights of disturbed sleep, he might have cried out, but he did not know if he had ever done so.  And besides, he had not just waked from an agitated sleep.  All this passed through his mind in an instant, in spite of his alarm.  “What time is it?” he asked.  “Nearly six o’clock.”  “Six o’clock!” “Do you not hear the vehicles in the street?  The street-venders are calling their wares.”  It must have been about one o’clock when he closed his eyes; he had then slept five hours, profoundly, and he felt calm, rested, refreshed, his body active and his mind tranquil, the man of former times, in the days of his happy youth, and not the half-insane man of these last frightful months.

He breathed a sigh.

“Ah, if I could have you always!” he murmured, as much to himself as to her.

And he gave her a long look mingled with a sad smile; then, placing his arm around her shoulders, he pressed her to him.

“Dear little wife!”

She had never heard so profound, so vibrating, a tenderness in his voice; never had she been able, until hearing these words, to measure the depth of the love that she had inspired in him; and it even seemed that this was the declaration of a new love.

Pressing her passionately to him, he repeated: 

“Dear little wife!”

Distracted, lost in her happiness, she did not reply.

All at once he held her from him gently, and looking at her with the same smile: 

“Does this word tell you nothing?”

“It tells me that you love me.”

“And is that all?”

“What more can I wish?  You say it, I feel it.  You give me the greatest joy of which I can dream.”

“It is enough for you?”

“It would be enough if it need never be interrupted.  But it is the misfortune of our life that we are obliged to separate at the time when the ties that unite us are the most strongly bound.”

“Why should we separate?”

“Alas!  Mamma?  And daily bread?”

“If you did not leave your mother.  If you need no longer worry about your life?”

She looked at him, not daring to question him, not betraying the direction of her thoughts except by a trembling that she could not control in spite of her efforts.

“I mean if you become my wife.”

“Oh, my beloved!”

“Will you not?”

She threw herself in his arms, fainting; but after a moment she recovered.

“Alas!  It is impossible,” she murmured.

“Why impossible?”

“Do not ask me; do not oblige me to say it.”

“But, on the contrary, I wish you to tell me.”