What then was Theresa doing, and how was it that she had essayed no effort to see again the man she loved? What thoughts and what feelings had she experienced since the terrible scene which had separated her from Hubert? With her, too, days had succeeded to days, but while the young man, a prey to a metamorphosis of soul provoked by the most unlooked-for and tragic of deceptions, suffered these rapid burning days to slip away as he passed from one extremity of the universe of feeling to the other, she, the guilty one, the vanquished one, was absorbed in a single thought. Herein like all women who love, she would have given her blood-drops, one after another, to cure the sorrow that she had caused to her lover. It was not that the visible details of her life were modified. Except for the first week, during which she had been overthrown, so to speak, by a continuous and shooting headache, she had, as the result of a reaction from the experience of so many emotions, resumed her vocation as a woman of fashion, her accustomed course of drives and visits, great dinners and receptions, theatre-goings or evening parties. But this completely external movement has never been able to hinder dreams any more than the employment of the needle does in fancy work. Though a strange fact at first sight, the explanation in the Avenue Friedland had been followed by a half-soothed relaxation in her soul, simply because voluntary confession had lessened remorse, as it always does. It is, too, on this unexplained law of our consciousness that the subtle psychology of the Catholic Church has based the principle of confession. If Theresa did not altogether forgive herself for her fault, she was, at least, no longer compelled by her thoughts of it to endure the contemplation of absolute baseness. The notion of a certain moral loftiness was now associated with it, ennobling it in her own eyes. This sleep of remorse left her free to absorb herself in the remembrance of Hubert. She now lived in a condition of deadly anxiety concerning him, and was dominated by a steady longing to see him again, not that she hoped to obtain her forgiveness from him, but she knew that he was unhappy, and she felt within her such a love for the youth whom she had wounded, that she would willingly have found means to dress and close the sore. How? She could not have told that; but it was not possible that such great, deeply-repentant tenderness could be inefficacious. In any case she must, at least, show Hubert the scope of the passion which she felt for him. Could this fail to touch him, to move him, to rescue him from despair? Now that she was no longer beneath the immediate burden of her infidelity, she did not judge of it from the essentially masculine standpoint, that is, as being something absolute and irreparable.