"And you admit it!" he cried; "calmly, frankly, you admit it? You do not see how infamous, how abominable, monstrous your vengeance is? Think of it; you take a being such as he is, pure, youthful, delicate, one incapable of distrust, one all simplicity, all innocence, and you make him love you at the risk of destroying him, of ruining his soul forever.--And for what?--To satisfy the miserable spite of a flirt angry at being deserted.--Even his freshness and nobility of soul did not make you hesitate. Did you never think that to deceive such a defenceless creature was infamous? Did you never think of what you were destroying in his soul? Knowing as you did the friendship that bound him to me, if there had been a spark of--I will not say nobility--a spark of humanity in your heart, you must have recoiled from this crime, from the loathsome infamy of soiling, of ravishing him from his noble, beautiful affection, to give him in exchange a frivolous _liaison_ of a few days, just long enough for you to find amusement in the vileness of your caprice!--He had done nothing to you! He had not deserted you! He had not married another!--Oh, God! What a cowardly, loathsome vengeance.--But at any rate I cry in your face that it was cowardly, cowardly, cowardly!" Ely sprang to her feet as her implacable enemy flung the insulting words in her face. Her eyes were fixed on Olivier with a regard in which there was no anger or revulsion of feeling under his affront. Her eyes even seemed to have an expression of calmness in their sincerity. She took a few steps toward the young man and put her hand on his arm--the arm that menaced her--with a gesture so gentle, and at the same time so firm, that Olivier stopped speaking. And she began to reply to him in a tone of voice that he did not recognize. It was so simple, so human, that it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of her words. Her heart was really disclosed before him. He felt that her words penetrated to the very centre of his inner nature. He loved this woman more than he knew himself. He had sought, without being able to create it, to call into being exactly what he now saw in the woman whose beauty he idolized. The soul that he saw shining through her tender, sad eyes, the passionate, shy, ardent soul, capable of the greatest, the most complete, sacrifice to love, was what he had divined to exist in her, what he had pursued without ever capturing, what he had longed for and had never possessed in spite of all their caresses, of all the violence and brutality of his jealousy! Her real nature had been awakened by another! And that other was his dearest friend!--He listened to Ely, for she was now speaking.