But Helen was not capable of such calculations. The most charming trait in her character was a spontaneity that might draw her into very great perils, but that at least always preserved her from a foulness which is more degrading than anything else--reflection in the midst of error. At this very moment, as she sat crouching upon her low chair, she did not think about the consequences of her approaching action, nor did she reason--she felt. The presence of Armand's letter caused her to be visited with excessive emotion. She scarcely so much as listened to the noise that her little boy made in playing beside her bed. The child was shaking his flaxen ringlets, and shouting and running about. He had set two chairs beside each other, and was creeping between them, pretending that he was a railway train passing through a tunnel. Since she had been in love with Armand, Helen had experienced strange feelings of sadness in the presence of her little Henry, and she had reproached herself for them as for a lack of tenderness, attributing them to remorse. In reality, her sorrow was due to the discovery in her son of an astonishing likeness to her husband. Even in his games the child recalled the conversation of the father, who from principle gave him for books nothing but scientific works, and then he had Alfred Chazel's eyes and his awkwardness in using his hands, and had only his mother's mouth and forehead. She spoiled him all the more for her consciousness of what she had taken from him to give to another! The child continued to play, looking sometimes towards his mother. The latter, at one moment, heaving a deep sigh, crumpled up the paper that she held in her hand, and flung it into the fire. The note had grown intolerable to her. She told herself, indeed, that it was more prudent on her lover's part to write to her in this tone of formal politeness, but it was such prudence as freezes, and in Helen's then unnerved condition she had need of a letter whose every phrase acts upon the reader's heart like invisible and caressing lips. The crumpled paper, letter and envelope together, rolled into the fire, and the child left the two chairs with which he was playing to come to his mother's side and watch it burn. "What are you looking at there, darling?" Helen said to him. "At the nuns, mamma," he replied. So he called the luminous dots that run across the black surface of paper consumed by fire. These dots were in his eyes nuns distractedly traversing their burnt cloister. "How they hurry," he said; "how frightened they are! Oh! that one, mamma, look at that one! The convent is falling down. They are all dead."