Ely listened, but made no reply. Worn out by the terrible emotion of her confidence on the previous night, she had no strength left to resist the tender suggestions which appealed to her love itself, to struggle against her love. There is, in fact, in these complete passions an instinctive and violent desire for extreme resolutions. When these sentiments cannot find satisfaction in perfect happiness, they obtain a kind of grateful relief in their absolute frustration. Filling our soul to the exclusion of all else, they bear it incessantly to one or the other of the two poles, ecstasy and despair, without resting for a moment between them. Having come to this stage of her passion, it followed of necessity, as Louise Brion had clearly seen, that the Baroness Ely should either become the young man's mistress, or that she should put between herself and him the insurmountable barrier of a separation before the _liaison_--secret romance of so many women, both virtuous and otherwise. Yes! how many women have thus, in a delirium of renouncement, dug an abyss between them and a secretly idolized being, who never suspects this idolatry or this immolation. To the innocent ones, the anticipation of the remorse which would follow their fault gives the requisite energy; the others, the culpable, feel, as Madame de Carlsberg felt so strongly, the inability to efface the past, and they prefer the exalted martyrdom of sacrifice to the intolerable bitterness of a joy forever poisoned by the atrocious jealousy of that indestructible past. Another influence aided in overcoming the young woman's spirit of revolt. Stranger as she was to all religious faith, she did not, like her pious friend, attach anything providential to this commonplace accident,--a newspaper account of a diplomatist's voyage,--but had acquired, through her very incredulity, that unconscious fatalism which is the last superstition of the sceptic. The sight of these fine printed syllables, "Olivier du Prat," a few hours after the night's conversation, had filled her with that feeling of presentiment, harder to brave than real danger for certain natures, like hers, made up of decision and action. "You are right," she answered, in the broken accent of an irremediable renunciation, "I will see him, I will speak to him, and all will be finished forever."