Absorbed as she was in these thoughts, nothing of which she expressed to the man who was their object, she no longer studied the impression which she herself produced upon her lover. When Armand came to dine in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, and all three of them--he, Alfred, and herself--remained to spend the evening in the little drawing-room, she lapsed into abysmal silence. Alfred delighted, as a mathematician, in abstract discussions, and set forth social, political, and economic theories to the young baron, who listened to him with visible weariness depicted upon his features. Then a moment would come when Helen, emerging from her reflections, looked at him. She saw this expression of weariness, and failed to comprehend its immediate and trifling cause. "He is not happy with me," she would say to herself, and immediately afterwards, with even greater simplicity, "He is not happy." So she reflected, she who had given herself to him to obliterate a wrinkle of melancholy upon his brow, she whose thoughts and feelings had but a single aim: his happiness! At other times, Armand would come, and at the first glance she discerned that while away from herself he had passed through periods of sadness. Then she felt quite paralysed. She trembled to speak to him, to utter a word that, coming from her lips, would displease him. An indefinable uneasiness took possession of her, a fear of showing her soul to the man she loved, that was all the more painful, for the fact that she had at first surrendered herself with such deep delight to the charm of feeling aloud in his presence, and this uneasiness with her now went even to their interviews in the Rue de Stockholm. It was not that in the little home she would find her lover less distracted with her beauty, less passionate than in the days which had followed upon the complete surrender. But his kisses, and the sort of frenzy with which he embraced her now, made her afraid. She dreaded to feel the contrast between the ecstasy caused to her lover by physical possession, and the evident weariness of soul which he displayed in their almost daily interviews. It seemed as though the young man were striving to electrify his heart with the desire for her person. When Helen perceived this cruel truth, the enchantment of the hours of meeting suddenly ceased. Sometimes she longed for these meetings with the gloomiest ardour, that she might at least hear her lover's voice lavishing upon her those phrases of intoxication which, at the beginning of their intercourse, had been the adorable music that had exalted her. Then she dreaded these same interviews, and their caresses into which the senses perhaps entered more than the heart. "Ah! my Armand," she had ventured to say to him, "you love my person more than you love myself." "Nay, do you not give yourself to me in giving me your person?" he had replied. Heavens! how gladly would she have asked him: "And you, do you give yourself entirely to me?"