that I used to be, and we will forget this nightmare that we are passing through together. Is it a bargain? You don't answer. Do you prefer hatred? Beware! I have never hated, but I can learn how; I learn quickly, you know! See, I clinched to-night with a drunken sailor twice as tall and strong as I; I thrashed him soundly, and received only a scratch. Beware lest I prove to be as strong mentally as physically on occasion, and lest, in a contest of hatred and vengeance, I crush the devil in person without leaving one of my hairs in his claws!" Laurent, pale-faced and bitter, by turns ironical and frantic, with his hair in disorder, his shirt torn, and his forehead smeared with blood, was so ghastly to look at and to hear, that Thérèse felt all her love change into disgust. She was in such despair at that moment that it did not occur to her to be afraid. Silent and motionless in the chair in which she had seated herself, she allowed this torrent of blasphemous words to roll forth unchecked, and, saying to herself that that madman was quite capable of killing her, she awaited with frigid disdain and absolute indifference the climax of his frenzy. He held his peace when he no longer had the strength to speak. Thereupon, she rose and left the room, without answering him by a single syllable, without casting a single glance at him. VII Laurent was not so contemptible as his words implied; he did not really believe a syllable of all the atrocious things he said to Thérèse during that horrible night. He believed them at the moment, or, rather, he spoke without heeding what he said. He remembered nothing of it after sleeping upon it, and if he had been reminded of it, would have denied every word. But one fact was undeniably true, that he was weary, for the moment, of dignified love, and craved, with his whole heart, the degrading excitements of the past. It was his punishment for following the evil path he had chosen early in life,--a very harsh punishment, no doubt, of which we can readily imagine that he complained bitterly, since he had not sinned with premeditation, but had plunged laughingly into an abyss from which he supposed that he could easily escape when he chose. But love is regulated by a code which seems to rest, like all social codes, upon that terrible formula: _No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law_! So much the worse for those who are ignorant of it! Let the child go within reach of the claws of the panther, thinking to pat it: the panther will make no allowance for such ignorance; it will devour the child because it is not in its nature to spare him. And so with poison, with the lightning and with vice, blind agents of the fatal law which man must study, or take the consequences. On the morrow of that explosion, naught remained in Laurent's memory save a vague idea that he had had a decisive explanation with Thérèse, and that she had seemed resigned.