"For mercy's sake calm yourself; remember that it is but a few days since you wrote me, '_An insurmountable obstacle separates us._'" "I can remember nothing but that I love you--I love you--I love you! This love has been subjected to every trial, it has increased in silence, it has resisted your affected indifference, it has penetrated your hidden tenderness, it has rendered me regardless of what I adored, disdainful of what I honoured. It burns my blood, it makes my reason wander, it overflows my heart. Paula, if you love me let us fly, or I die!" "Alas! De Morville, and can you believe that you are suffering alone? Suffer--oh, no! I may now defy a life of torments; I can die; I have been loved, as I have dreamed of being loved--loved with madness, loved without calculation, scruple, or remorse--loved with such blindness that you do not even suspect the enormity of the sacrifices you offer to me, the depth of the abyss into which you would precipitate us." "Paula, Paula, do not speak to me thus--you drive me mad: you do not know--no, you do not know, what is the seduction of a single thought, which absorbs all others in its current, always becoming deeper, wider, swifter. I, who until now could walk with head erect, dare no longer do so--there are looks I avoid--I dare not meet----" "You? you?" "Do you know what I have often said to myself--since an oath (which I will no longer observe) kept me estranged from you?" "Do not speak thus." "Well! first reflecting on the frail health of your husband, I said to myself, M. de Hansfeld may die--that would not afflict me; if his life depended on me, I should let him perish. Then I have advanced even farther; I have--but no, no--I dare not tell you this--no, not to you; I should overwhelm you with horror. Oh! cursed be the day when for the first time that thought came across my brain." And De Morville hid his face in his hands. The last words he had pronounced were destined long to find an echo in Paula's heart. She was at once alarmed, and yet almost happy at the strange moral complicity with which De Morville, until then so generous and noble-minded, shared her homicidal wishes towards the prince. In this complete overthrow of the principles of the man by whom she was adored she saw a fresh proof of the influence she exercised. Yet, by one of those contradictions, one of those feelings of devotion so common in the female mind, Madame de Hansfeld promised herself to do all in her power to remove henceforth and for ever such thoughts from De Morville's mind, and that because, perhaps, from that very moment she herself was taking the most criminal resolutions. Whatever might result, she determined that De Morville should never reproach himself hereafter for the wishes that had escaped him in a moment of frenzy. De Morville's head was pressed in his two hands with agony, when Madame de Hansfeld said to him in a gentle but firm voice,--