“I cannot bear it. I cannot go to England. Come to me and tell me that we can be married at once, and that you will take me back with you.—LUCIENNE.” That was all, but at these few lines Gilbert stood staring, stunned. After a moment he sat dizzily down, and resting his elbow on the table put his hand over his eyes the better to taste this enormous, this overwhelming surprise. He was too dumbfounded for consecutive reflection, but the first thought which penetrated his stupor was one of such radiant and piercing joy that his reason seemed to shake beneath its onslaught. The nightmare was but a nightmare after all. “Thank God! thank God!” he cried with his deepest soul. It was all false. The proof had come to him here in this very room which had witnessed his black night of despair; this was the very table on which he had bowed his head, those were the same chimes of Notre Dame des Victoires floating, now, through the sunlight. . . . And she had gone; he could not thank her for this great proof of her love; for at first he saw it in that aspect, judging the trust and confidence which must have prompted her to so unusual a step. The trust and confidence; yes, and what must she not have suffered when the next evening he had visited her and said no word of her appeal? He looked again at the date: he was not mistaken; the letter had been written on the evening of the day when she had exchanged the guardianship of the Princess for that of Madame Gaumont. Poor child! how horribly she must have suffered! His stirred feelings lent him enough imagination to put himself in her place. Was it any wonder that she had seemed strange, and that overcome by the strain she had fainted at the additional shock given, very naturally, by the news of Louis’ arrest? What must she have thought of him? What, too, if she had known his unworthy, his vile suspicions of her? How large a part had his involuntary silence not played in the state in which he had just found her? And she was gone, thinking—what? He walked for a minute or two in agitation up and down the room, until going back to the table he picked up the little note, so pathetic in its need and its trustfulness. An idea that was half a hope flashed upon him. That blackened, scorched corner meant one of two things: either the letter had fallen into the fire by mischance, Lucienne being left in the impression that she had sent it, or she had intended to burn it. It had in that case been but the outcry of her distress, destroyed because it had seemed to her unmaidenly. And he devoutly hoped that this was the case, because it left him all the perfume of the message and relieved her of the dreadful tension of waiting for an answer which he had never given.