All these thoughts passed very quickly through their minds, the more quickly because they were simply conscious of them, and did not stop to try to analyze them. The all-powerful human electricity, less known than the other variety, was playing its game, impossible to follow, in their hearts, with its vast net-work of currents and connections. In these two creatures of instinct, the ever-recurring prodigy of love, of natural affinity--of the sympathies and their opposite--was seen once more, as mysterious, as marvellous, as profound as ever. So far as nature is concerned, there are two beings: man and woman; there are no subdivisions. At the basis of humanity, all life is the same, all passion is the same. The student of the higher races labors incessantly to perfect his reasoning and his powers of expression, but there is more overflowing, complicated life in the heart of his ignorant brother than in the heads of the philosophers, who, by dint of self-analysis, have lost the faculty of emotion. They who deem themselves most skilful in discovering the real man in themselves, do not perceive that they pervert the secret impulses of their hearts by keeping too close a watch upon them. The light of their miner's lamp changes the psychological conditions, just as constant light would modify the physiological condition of human beings and plants. And, meanwhile, love and death repeat, in the eternal darkness of their simple hearts, their unwitnessed miracles. They had reached the landing on the first floor--as large as an ordinary room. At the last step, Renaud, almost lifting Livette to the landing, tried to draw her to him, but she was seized with an impulse to resist, and he with a sudden impulse to resist himself; separately, the two impulses would have had no effect; but combined, they exerted sufficient force to place an obstacle between them, as if by mutual consent. That force was the witchery at work. As they did not exchange a word, their embarrassment increased. Hastily, to escape the constraint each imposed upon the other, she ran to the door at the right and entered. And he, well pleased to be able to do or say something to bring them nearer together, called out: "Wait for the light, Livette! I am coming." But Livette had suddenly remembered the gipsy's threat. "It is fate," she said to herself, "I see it now!" And she felt herself grow pale. Then she had an inspiration. "Follow me, Renaud." They passed through rooms where furniture of the time of the Empire was sleeping beneath its covers, and the long hangings falling from the ceiling in broad, stiff folds, and withered, as it were, by time; rooms seldom visited by the master, but kept in order by Livette and her grandmother. At last, Renaud and Livette reached an apartment with bare, whitewashed walls, once used as a chapel.