George Liauran had been told the truth. During the unhappy woman's stay at the seaside there had been enacted in her life one of those secret dreams of infidelity which frequently occur in the lives of women who have once deviated from the straight path. But our actions, however guilty they may be, do not always give the measure of our souls. Madame de Sauve's nature comprised very lofty portions by the side of very low ones, and was a singular mixture of corruption and nobility. She might, indeed, commit abominable faults, but to forgive them in herself, after the happy custom of most women of the same description, that she could not do, and now less than ever after what her passion for Hubert had been to her life for several months. Ah! her life! her life! It was this that Theresa de Sauve saw in the flickering flames in the fireplace that autumn evening, with her heart racked with apprehension. The whole weight of her former errors, her criminal errors, was now falling upon her heart, and she remembered her state of dull agony when she had met Hubert. Theresa de Sauve had been endowed by nature with those dispositions which are most fatal to a woman in modern society, unless she marries under rare conditions, or unless maternity saves her from herself by breaking the energies of her physical, and engrossing the fervour of her moral, vitality. She had a romantic heart, while her temperament made her a creature of passion, that is to say, she fostered both dreams of feeling and unconquerable appetites for sensation. When persons of this kind meet on the threshold of their lives, with a man who satisfies the twofold needs of their nature, there are between them and this man such mysterious festivities of love as poets conceive but never embrace. Where their destiny wills that they shall be delivered, as Theresa had been to her husband, to a man who treats them from the very first like courtesans, who initiates them in deed and thought into the whole science of pleasure, but who has not sufficient poetry to satisfy the other half of their souls, such women necessarily become curiosos, capable of falling into the worst experiences, and then their sterility even becomes a happiness, for they at least do not transmit that flame of sentimental and sensual life which they have commonly inherited from a mother's error.