"Be still, my heart, but speak thou forth fierce pride, And tell me that my sway no share must know, Nor can I pardon her the grievous blow Who knew another's couch although my bride. At least, I've seen her as she vainly tried, Her soul in tears dissolved, and crouching low, To find the look my eyes could yet forego; And, kingly silent, I have turned aside. She knew not that, when grief distraught, were heard Her plaintive tones entreat a single word, I suffered even as she, and loved her still. In silence only, outraged man is strong; For vengeance tells a tale of secret ill, And I would be believed above all wrong." "Yes," said Hubert to himself, "he is right: silence--" The verses moved him childishly, as happens with ordinary readers of poetry, who require a literary work merely to excite or to soothe the inward wound. "Silence . . ." he resumed. "Do we speak to one that is dead? Well, Theresa is dead to me." Thus expressing himself in the solitude of his study, where he now spent nearly all his days, Hubert had no ill-will remaining against his mistress. As no new fact came to rouse fresh feelings within him, the old ones, which had existed before the betrayal, reappeared. The images of his remembrances abounded within him, nor did he drive them away, and under their influence his anger little by little became something abstract, rational, and, so to speak, expedient in his eyes; but in reality he had never loved this woman so much as he did now when he believed himself sure of never seeing her again. He loved her, in fact, as though she were dead; but who does not know that is the most indestructible and frantic tenderness? When irrevocable separation has not primarily resulted in the killing of love, it exalts it on the contrary in a strange fashion. Impossible to embrace, so present and so far away, the dim shape of the wished-for phantom hovers before our gaze with the beauty that life will never wither more, and our whole soul goes out sadly and passionately to meet it. The duration of days is annihilated. The sweetness of the past flows back in its fulness within us, and then begins a singular and retrospective kind of enchantment which is like hallucination in the heart.