"How strange! I felt wholly different from what I had expected, what I ought, I think, to have felt, at the sight of him. Yes, I confess it with horror (who will ever know this avowal?), my anger, my indignation, do not seem to be commensurate with his crimes. "In vain do I curse my weakness; in vain do I say to myself that this man has calumniated me in an infamous manner; in vain do I repeat to myself that he has slain Raphael, that he is almost the author of the ills I endure, that he can at this moment ruin me. In spite of myself I have the baseness to believe that it is the love with which I have inspired him which has plunged him into this abyss of horrible actions. Dare I add, that sometimes I am capable of excusing him?" De Brévannes felt his heart beat violently; his unchecked pride, the blindness of his passion, served Iris even beyond her hope. Nothing is more vulgar, more antiquated, yet more true than the adage, "_We believe what we desire._" In these pages, which he believed were written by Madame de Hansfeld, M. de Brévannes beheld the proof of an impression which was composed of hatred and love, affright and admiration. Admiration scarcely avowed, it is true, but which, as De Brévannes' vanity suggested, was but love unsuspected or resisted. A fact very strange, but very skilfully handled by Iris, contributed to increase the error of M. de Brévannes. He had only made a declaration once to Paula, and from the fragment we have quoted, he might believe that she had not responded to his passion through jealousy of the apparent attentions which he paid to her aunt; and thus he might also believe that his infamous calumny, if not forgotten, was at least almost excused by the feigned words of the princess. "It is the love with which I have inspired him which has plunged him into this abyss of horrible actions. Dare I add, that sometimes I am capable of excusing him?" As to the death of Raphael, whom Paula loved with a feeling "_more soft than friendship, but more tranquil than love_," this murder, almost justified by the attack of this unfortunate young man, was, it is true, one of the causes which most forcibly resisted the irresistible inclination of Madame de Hansfeld for M. de Brévannes. Without the authority of the black book, it then must have been a complete blindness to explain thus the conduct of Madame de Hansfeld; but M. de Brévannes, believing that he perused writing traced by her, had too much pride and love not to adopt at once this interpretation, which was so extremely natural. Why should De Brévannes mistrust Iris? Why should he have believed her capable of so strange a deception? As to the princess, for what purpose should she have written these pages, which she never could suppose would be submitted to any other eye than her own?