The mystic effusion then returned: "On earth? Can there be then another world whereof this is but the symbol or the preparation? But how can any link subsist between this and that? How can any help come in hours of distress? Ah! if He were a heavenly Father, would not all suffering be in his sight a prayer?" Through the tumult of all these contradictory thoughts, the unhappy man perceived that grand, unique problem of human life which religion alone can solve, that of knowing whether beyond our limited days, our brief sensations, our fleeting actions, there be something which does not pass away, and which can satisfy our hunger and thirst for the infinite. Armand was perhaps to become religious again some day; at the present moment he was not so, and he answered himself: "If there be nothing, why this terrible remorse? If there be something, why am I unable either to conceive it with my intellect or to feel it with my heart? How can I put an end to this unbearable anguish? How raise the weight that is stifling me?" The principal incidents during these gloomy days were some letters from Alfred, filled with affection and with complaints about his wife's health, the sadness of his home, his anxieties for the future. Helen therefore continued to be unhappy. "Ah!" thought Armand, "it is possible that the words 'good' and 'evil,' 'soul' and 'God,' have no kind of meaning. For thousands of years philosophers have been disputing inconclusively about them, and religions have been succeeding to one another and crumbling away. I have measured the impotence of reason and I have not faith. But there is need neither of reason nor of faith to know whether human misery exists, and to know that we ought to do everything to avoid being the cause of this misery." We ought! As though we were free! But free or not, let us be sensible of this misery and pity it! When the young man entered upon the new path of pity, he experienced, not absolute relief from his remorse, but a sort of despairing tenderness which at last moistened his heart. He pictured Helen to himself when quite a little girl in a past such as her confidences had revealed to him, and he pitied her for her sad childhood and her oppressed youth. He pitied her for her marriage and for the moral divorce which had separated her from Alfred. He pitied her for having known himself, Armand, for the words that he had uttered to her and which she had believed, for the kisses which he had asked of her and which she had given him. But especially for that second fall, for that frenzy which had thrown her into the arms of Varades did he passionately pity her, and for all the errors into which this first error would draw her. He pitied her for her birth, for her existence, for her subjection to an unconquerable fate!