If he had not absolutely lied to his mother in telling her that he was going to join his friend Emmanuel Deroy in London, he had nevertheless deceived this jealous mother by concealing from her that he would meet Madame de Sauve at Folkestone. Now, Madame de Sauve was not free. Madame de Sauve was married, and in the eyes of a young man brought up as the pious Hubert had been, to love a married woman constituted an inexpiable fault. Hubert must and did believe himself in a condition of mortal sin. His Catholicism, which was not merely a religion of fashion and posture, left him in no doubt on this point. But religion, family obligations of truthfulness, fears for the future, all these phantoms of conscience appeared to him--conditioned only as phantoms, vain, powerless images, vanishing before the living evocation of the beauty of the woman who, five months before had entered into his heart to renew all within it, the woman whom he loved and by whom he knew himself to be loved. Hubert had told the truth, in that he was not Madame de Sauve's lover in that sense of entire and physical possession in which the term is understood in our language. She had never belonged to him, and it was the first time that he was going to be really alone with her, in that solitude of a foreign land which is the secret dream of everyone who loves. While the train was steaming at full speed through plains alternately ribbed with hills, intersected with watercourses, and bristling with bare trees, the young man was absorbed in telling the rosary of his recollections. The charm of the hours that were gone was rendered still dearer to him by the expectation of some immense and undefined happiness. Although Madame Liauran's son was twenty-two years of age, the manner of his education had kept him in that state of purity so rare among the young men of Paris, who, for the most part, have exhausted pleasure before they have had so much as a suspicion of love. But a fact of which the young fellow was not aware was that it had been this very purity which had acted more powerfully than the most accomplished libertinism could have done upon the romantic imagination of the woman whose profile was passing to and fro before his gaze with the motion of the carriage, and showing itself alternately against woods, hills and dunes. How many images does a passing train thus bear along, and with them how many destinies rushing towards weal or woe in the distant and the unknown!