How soft they were, those woman's hands, and how loyal they seemed! but to entrust one's heart to them, believing in a mutual affection, was the most foolish of follies! She smiles upon you, and weeps for you, and already she has noticed a passer-by, to whom, if he amuse her for an hour, she will sacrifice all your tenderness, with flame in her eyes and grace on her lips! Ah! why? why? Yet what truth can there be in the world if even love is not true? And what love? Hubert was now thoroughly investigating his past; he conscientiously examined his attachment to Theresa, and he did himself the justice to acknowledge that for months past he had not had a thought that was not for her. He had certainly made mistakes, but they had always been for her, and even at this hour he could not repent them. He would have found relief for all his pain in kneeling before the priest who had trained him, and saying: "Father, I have sinned." But no; it was beyond his power to regret the actions in which Theresa, his Theresa, had been involved. Yes, he had idolised her with unswerving fervour, and it was his first love, and it would be the last, or at least he thought so, and he had shown her his confidence in the continuance of their feelings with incalculable ingenuousness. Nothing of all this had had sufficient influence over her to arrest her at the moment when she committed her infamy,--with the same body. He could suddenly breathe its aroma, and again feel its impression over his whole being; then there was a resurrection of jealousy, painful even to torture, and continually he harped on the "why? why?"--in despair, and pitiful, like so many before him, from clashing against the unanswerable riddle of a woman's soul, guilty once, guilty again, guilty even to her grey hairs and to her death itself. This new form of grief lasted for days and days afterwards. The young man was giving free rein within himself to a new feeling of which he had never had a suspicion hitherto, and which he was henceforward to endure continually--mistrust. From his earliest years he had lived with a complete faith in the appearances which surrounded him. He had believed in his mother. He had believed in God. He had believed in the sincerity of every word and caress. Above all, he had believed in Theresa de Sauve. He had assimilated her in thought with the rest of his life. All was truth around him; thus Theresa's love had appealed to him as a supreme truth, and now, by a mental revolution which betrayed the primitive flaw in his education, he was assimilating all the rest of his life with this woman of falsehood.