"Forgive me, madame; you are right, I do suffer terribly, and I forget those things which I should respect. Pray, forget yourself the bitterness I have allowed to appear! my heart will not fail to lock itself up again." Madame de Ramière, although somewhat reassured by this reply, could not rid herself of all anxiety when she saw with what profound hatred Ralph regarded her son. She tried to excuse him in his enemy's eyes, but he checked her. "I divine your thoughts, madame," he said; "but have no fear, Monsieur de Ramière and I are not likely to meet again at present. As for my cousin, do not regret having enlightened me. If the whole world abandons her, I swear that she will always have at least one friend." When Madame de Ramière returned home, toward evening, she found Raymon luxuriously ensconced in front of the fire, warming his slippered feet and drinking tea to banish the last vestiges of the nervous excitement of the morning. He was still cast down by that artificial emotion; but pleasant thoughts of the future revivified his faculties; he felt that he had become free once more, and he abandoned himself unreservedly to blissful meditations upon that priceless condition, which he had hitherto been so unsuccessful in maintaining. "Why am I destined," he said to himself, "to weary so quickly of this priceless freedom of the heart which I always have to buy so dearly? When I feel that I am caught in a woman's net, I cannot break it quickly enough, in order to recover my repose and mental tranquillity. May I be cursed if I sacrifice them in such a hurry again! The trouble these two creoles have caused me will serve as a warning, and hereafter I do not propose to meddle with any but easy-going, laughing Parisian women--genuine women of the world. Perhaps I should do well to marry and have done with it, as they say----" He was absorbed by such comforting, commonplace thoughts as these, when his mother entered, tired and deeply moved. "She is better," she said; "everything has gone off as well as possible; I hope that she will grow calmer and----" "Who?" inquired Raymon, waking with a start among his castles in Spain. However, he concluded on the following day that he still had a duty to perform, namely, to regain that woman's esteem, if not her love. He did not choose that she should boast of having left him; he proposed that she should be persuaded that she had yielded to the influence of his good sense and his generosity. He desired to govern her even after he had spurned her; and he wrote to her as follows: