Theresa de Sauve might have been a woman buried, sewn up in a shroud, laid in the coldness of the funeral vault for ever, and Hubert would not have abandoned himself more to the gnawings of his memory, to the mad ardour of love which lacks both hope and desire, and is wholly made up of ecstacy of what once has been,--and can never be again. By means of her notes, which he had kept, and which he re-read until he knew every word by heart, he reconstructed, hour by hour, the delicious months of his past intoxication. Theresa was in the habit of never dating her letters, but of simply writing the name of the day at the head of them, "Thursday," "Wednesday," "Saturday." Hubert found the day of the month from the post-mark, thanks to the pious care with which he had preserved all the envelopes, for the childish reason that he could not have destroyed a line of that handwriting without pain. Even after so many weeks, he had failed to become insensible to the emotion caused him by the sight of the letters of his name traced by Theresa's hand. Yes; hour by hour he revived the life already lived. The charm of the bygone moments reappeared so complete, so rapturous, so heart-breaking! It had passed away as everything does, and the young man had come to rebel no longer against the enigma of which he was the victim. The Christian notion of responsibility was succeeded within him by an obscure fatalism. The termination of his happiness was now explained in his eyes by the inevitable misery of mankind. He almost acquitted his phantom of a fault which seemed to him to be bound up with natural fatalities; and then he began to think that this phantom was not that of a dead woman with closed eyes, motionless bosom, and shut lips, but of a living creature with beating eyelids, throbbing heart, and parted lips that were fresh and warm; and, tormented in spite of himself by some vague, dim desire, he again began to murmur: "What is she doing?"