It was that very moral change so rightly diagnosed by M. des Graves in Gilbert which accounted for the bewildering subsidence of the emotions that the priest had expected him to manifest. The metamorphosis was like a river which, suddenly swerving from its course, invades a valley and makes of it a lake. A new landscape surprises the traveller, but underneath the encroaching waters lie all the time the features which were there before them, to emerge, perhaps, but little altered from their burial. So, under the new interests which flooded Gilbert’s mind, partly submerged by them in a wholly natural manner, but in part voluntarily thrust down and held down, there existed, unforgotten, the turmoil of feeling with which he had left his home in July. But he had come back full of ardour, on fire with schemes, and quite consciously he had resolved that his own affairs should wait a little. The carrying out of this resolution demanded, even in his new frame of mind, not a little carefulness and self-control. He had been at some pains, by laying stress, in his narrative, on the force of circumstances, to hide deeply from his hearers—perhaps even to obscure from himself—how much less he had snatched at the opportunity of a journey into Brittany from political desire than from the craving for a respite from his own private passions. It was true that, on the journey so undertaken, the secondary motive had at last swallowed up the primary and sharper. He knew that, but it was his concern that others should be ignorant of the double incentive. Yet his feelings towards Lucienne, far from having paled, were infinitely fiercer. That intensification of the powers of his will, which was really the heart of the change in him, had reacted on his attitude towards her, of which it was itself in part the offspring. His love for her, since passion had flowed into it that day in the Tuileries, had suffered neither diminution nor increase, but his determination to possess her in spite of everything had immensely grown. That same feeling, at once loverlike and paternal, which had dictated the terms of the letter sent by Trenchard, still ruled his thoughts of her and the letters which he constantly wrote to her. But the natural result of his wilful exoneration of the girl was insensibly to throw heavier and heavier odium on the man who had entrapped her. In spite of his resolution the old nightmare of his wrongs began to press on him again, yet not so heavily but that he could control the expression of it. Indeed, he had slipped back so insensibly to the cold reserve of his pre-Brittany relations with Louis that neither of them had been quite aware of the reversion. Even the priest could only ask himself sometimes whether his manner to Louis was not suspicious, and could not answer his own question.