As Emmanuel Deroy had been attached to the embassy at Constantinople before going to London, his apartments were adorned throughout with Oriental materials, and this large divan, hung with drapery, and placed just opposite the door of a little garden, was particularly dear to Hubert and Theresa. They had chatted so much among these cushions, with their heads resting unitedly upon them, at those moments of intimacy which follow upon the intoxications of love, and which, by him at least, were preferred to them; for, although he loved Theresa to the point of sacrificing everything for her, he had, nevertheless, at the bottom of his conscience, remained a Catholic, and a dim remorse mingled its secret bitterness with the sweetness that was given him by the kisses. He used to think of his own fault, and especially of the sin which he caused Theresa to commit; for in the simplicity of his heart he imagined that he had seduced her. She sank rather than sat down on the deep divan, and he began to take off her veil, bonnet, and mantle. She allowed him to do so, smiling at him the while with infinite tenderness. After her hours of torturing sleeplessness, there was to her something at once very bitter and very affecting in the impress of the young man's coaxing. She found him so affectionate, so delicately intimate, so like himself, that she thought that she had without doubt been mistaken as to the meaning of the note, and, to rid herself immediately of uncertainty, she said, in reply to his question about her health: "No, I am not ill; but the tone of your note was so strange that it has made me uneasy." "My note?" rejoined Hubert, pressing her cold hands, in order to warm them. "Ah! it was not worth while. Look here, I dare not now acknowledge to you why I wrote it." "Acknowledge it all the same," she said, with an already anguish-stricken insistence, for Hubert's embarrassment had just brought back to her the anxiety which had caused her so much suffering. "People are so strange!" replied the young man, shaking his head. "There are times when, in spite of themselves they doubt what they know best. But first you must forgive me beforehand." "Forgive you, my angel!" she said. "Ah! I love you too well! Forgive you!" she repeated; and these syllables, which she heard her own voice uttering, echoed in an almost intolerable fashion through her conscience. How willingly, indeed, would she have had reason to forgive instead of to be forgiven. "But for what?" she asked, in a lower tone, which revealed the renewal of her inward emotion. "For having allowed myself to be disturbed for a moment by an infamous calumny which persons who hate our love have repeated to me about your life at Trouville. But what is the matter?"