“I ask you, do you think that you could be happy under those circumstances?” She looked at me. “You see, then, that I am now miserable?” “You told me so in a letter, when I was staying at Varennes, eight months ago.” “And have you not forgotten what I wrote to you so long as eight months ago?” I drew a little portfolio from my pocket, and out of it I took a little scrap of paper, on which was written, in her hand— “I have no friend, Réné; will you be one? I am very unhappy.” “If the paper is a little crumpled,” said I, “it is because a day has never passed without my reading it.” “Then how is it that I have never seen you since that morning, Réné?” “For what purpose? Since you wrote to me you cannot have doubted me.” “You have a good heart, Réné, and I did not wish to see you to get that opinion from you.” “That is well. If you had had need of me, you had but to write, and I should have been with you in a moment. At first, day after day, I hoped for a letter. Oh, if I had received one!—had it been only the one word ‘Come!’—with what joy would I have flown to your side! But such happiness was not for me. Days, weeks, months passed away, and I remained alone with my sorrow, without ever being called away to offer you a consolation.” She looked at me with an expression of affectionate tenderness. “Ah, Réné, I should have liked to have seen you; but not hearing from you, I thought that you had forgotten me.” “Oh, Mdlle. Sophie!” I cried; “I am not sufficiently happy or unhappy for that.” “In truth, my dear Réné,” said she, trying to smile, “you have quite the air of a hero of romance.” “As I have never read a romance, I scarcely know what that is.” “A hero of romance, Réné,” said Sophie, smiling at the experimental lesson in literature she was trying to give me, “is a man who loves without hope.” “That is good. Then am I a hero of romance. By the bye, what are these heroes supposed to do?” “Everything impossible, in order to touch the heart of the woman they vainly love.” “Then I am ready to do so; but, if commanded by you, I should know not impossibility.” “Do not put your life in danger, Réné,” said Sophie. “Sighing for that would not benefit either of us.” Now it was her turn to stop, and, having turned the corner of the road, she pointed out to me my uncle’s house under a different aspect, but still how beautiful!