A like convulsive trembling seized Pierre Hautefeuille as he read this letter, in which he saw the proof after twenty-four hours of incertitude--the indisputable overwhelming proof--that his action had been seen. By whom? But what mattered the name of the witness, now that Madame de Carlsberg was informed? His secret instinct had not deceived him. She had summoned him in order to reprove his indiscretion, perhaps to banish him forever from her presence. The certainty that the subject of this interview would be the act for which he now reproached himself as for a crime was so intolerable to the lover that he was seized with the idea of not going to the rendezvous, of never seeing again that offended woman, of fleeing anywhere far away. He took up the letter, saying, "It is true; there is nothing but to go!" Wildly, yet mechanically, as though a mesmeric suggestion had emanated from the written words on that little sheet of paper, he rang, ordered the timetable, his bill, and his trunk. If the express to Italy, instead of leaving late in the afternoon, had left at about eleven, perhaps the poor young man, in that hour of semi-madness, would have precipitately taken flight--an action which in a few hours was to appear as senseless as it now appeared necessary. But he was forced to wait, and, the first crisis once over, he felt that he should not, that he could not go without explaining himself. He did not think of justifying himself. In his own eyes he was unpardonable. And yet he did not wish Madame de Carlsberg to condemn him without a plea for the delicacy of his intentions. What would he say to her, however? During the hours that separated him from his rendezvous, how many discourses he imagined without suspecting that the imperious force that attracted him to the Villa Helmholtz was not the desire to plead his cause! It was toward the sensation of her presence that he was irresistibly moving, the one idea around which everything centres in that heart of a lover, at which everything ends, from the most justifiable bitterness to the extremest timidity. When the young man entered the parlor of the Villa Helmholtz, the excess of his emotions had thrown him into that state of waking somnambulism in which the soul and body obey an impulse of which they are scarcely conscious. This state is analogous to that of a resolute man passing through a very great danger--a similitude which proves that the two fundamental instincts of our nature, that of self-preservation and that of love, are the work of impersonal forces, exterior and superior to the narrow domain of our conscious will.