Moreover,--and Renaud himself had heard the story from the shepherds who pass the winter in Camargue and Crau, and spend their nights in summer counting the stars upon the summits of the Alps,--there are, in space, beyond the skies visible to our eyes, fires alight so far away from us, so far away that their light, now on its way toward our earth, will not reach us for centuries to come. The men who follow us centuries hence will see twinkling stars that even in our day were lighted and making signs we could not see. And in those days ideas, which are already kindled in men's minds, and are seen to-day by none save those in whom their light is shed, will shine for all, and one of them will be, for every mortal, the love and pity of the world. Certain it is, that neither Renaud nor Livette could fathom those infinite depths; but from the vast expanse of heaven, swarming with tiny lights, a nameless emotion stole into their hearts, made up of all their hopes to come. Future worlds, lovelier than this of ours, were dreaming in them, with them. In them, too, because they were young and human, there was a share in the future. In them, too, was the responsibility for future lives. In them, too, lurked the mystery of generations to be born, for whom a single couple, surviving the wreck of the demolished world, would be enough to bestow upon them the desire to live and the power. A spark is the basis of all fire. A man and a woman are the basis of all love. Infinity is no greater than the number two. And that is why the great scholars, who figure like Barrême, know no more of life and the heart than Livette and Renaud--who knew nothing at all. They knew naught save that they were alive and that they wished to love each other and that they sought and shunned each other at the same moment--but they did not ask each other why. They said nothing. They felt. They could not say to each other that rivalry and jealousy, that is to say grief, serve the designs of nature, whose purpose doubtless is, by arousing those emotions, to quicken desire, so that creation may be assured by outbursts of passion, and the future of mankind by the imperious need of pleasure. What does the law care for the weak and the vanquished? the strong alone, they say, it wishes to perpetuate. Pity and justice are human inventions, and will never triumph until they have been slowly assimilated by the human mind to the matter of which it is made.