My spirit rose and strengthened itself with the deep sense of what I owed to her, to myself, and to the dead. “I will, Mariette,” I answered, “I will tell you every thing—every thought, every feeling, as if I were reading out of the book where they are all recorded.” She bent down her head very low, and, seated beside her, I went on. My conscience tells me that I concealed nothing, that I laid my whole heart before her. But that which seemed to strike her most, was the gentle, tender love of poor Louise. When I ended the tale with the dear girl’s death, she seemed to have forgotten herself altogether, and gazing up in my face, with the look of a pitying angel, she said, “Poor, poor Louise! How you must have loved her!” The blood rushed up into my cheeks, and I bent down my face as if to avoid her gaze, murmuring what was perhaps too true, “Not as much as she deserved!” Mariette started, and I added rapidly, “Do not mistake me, dear girl, I loved her well, very well—I never loved but one better. But I loved her not with that passionate earnestness—with that deep, intense, all absorbing affection which such devotion as hers well merited. I could have seen Louise wedded to another without despair, or agony, or death. I bore her father’s rejection of me with easy, patient fortitude; and I could have put my hand to any act that would have made her happy. Oh, Mariette, let poets, and fiction-writers say what they will, to render mortal love as intense as it may be, there must be a grain of mortal selfishness in it. Passion must be blended with affection; and I have learned—learned from another, that in true love there can be no happiness, no peace, no tranquillity, no life without the loved one.” She shook like an aspen; but her lips murmured, “From whom?” “You,” I answered. “Oh, Louis, Louis,” she said, “are we not both wronging her who is gone?” “Both!” that word was sufficient; but I would not hurt her feelings by catching at it as eagerly as my heart prompted. I took her hand gently, and quietly in mine, and said in a low lone, “No, Mariette—no, dearest girl. I can never wrong her by telling you the truth. I have concealed nothing from you, my Mariette—I have not concealed from you my deep affection for her, my tenderness—my care of her— my bitter sorrow for her death. Why should I conceal any thing else from you?—why should I not tell the truth in all as well as in a part? Why should I hide from you, that though for a few short days I have been the husband of another, that though she had my esteem, my strong regard, my tenderest pity, my warm affection in a certain sense, I have never truly, really loved but you, from boyhood up to manhood—from my earliest memories to this present hour? Why should I not say to you, that I have always thought of you, dreamed of you, looked for you, longed for you? Believe me, dear Mariette, believe me! If you do not, how can I prove it to you?”