And, resting her head on her friend's shoulder, she began to weep, to weep like a child, while the other, bewildered at this sudden and unexpected outburst, replied--revealing even in her pity the naïveté of an honest woman, incapable of suspicion:-- "I beg you calm yourself. It is true it is a terrible misfortune for a woman to love when she has no right to satisfy it. But, do not feel remorseful, and, above all, do not think I blame you. When I spoke as I did it was to put you on your guard against a wrong that you might do. Ah! I see too well that you have not been a coquette. I know you have not allowed the young man to divine your feelings, and I know, too, that he will never divine them, and that you will be always my blameless Ely. Calm yourself, smile for me. Is it not good to have a friend, a real friend, who can understand you?" "Understand me? Poor Louise! You love me, yes, you love me well. But you do not know me." Then, in a kind of transport, she took her friend's arm, and, looking her in the face, "Listen!" she said, "you believe me still to be, as I was once, your blameless Ely. Well, it is not true. I have had a lover. Hush, do not answer. It must be said. It is said. And that lover is the most intimate friend of Pierre Hautefeuille, a friend to him as you are to me, a brother in friendship as you are my sister. That is the weight that you have divined here," and she laid her hand upon her breast. "It is horrible to bear." Certain confessions are so irremediable that their frankness gives to those who voluntarily make them something of grandeur and nobility even in their fall; and when the confession is made by some one whom we love, as Louise loved Ely, it fills us with a delirium of tenderness for the being who proves her nobility by her confession while the misery of her shame rends her heart. If a few hours before, in some house at Monte Carlo, the slightest word had been said against the honor of Madame de Carlsberg, what indignation would Madame Brion have not felt, and what pain! Pain she indeed had, agonizing pain, as Ely pronounced these unforgetable words; but of indignation there was not a trace in the heart which replied with these words, whose very reproach was a proof of tenderness, blind and indulgent to complicity:-- "Just God! How you must have suffered! But why did you not tell me before? Why did you not confide in me? Did you think that I would love you less? See, I have the courage to hear all." And she added, in that thirst for the whole truth which we have for the faults of those who are dear to us, as though we looked to find a pardonable excuse in the cruel details:-- "I beg you, tell me all, all. And first, this man? Do I know him?"