In the morning, I had taken this resolution and I was going to speak about it to the marquis immediately; he did not let me say a word, he was so agitated by the arrival of his daughter: “Very well,” said he, “by and by, I have no head for anything now. This willfulness! That is why I have grown old so fast. Always new shocks!” Who knows? my destiny may have entirely depended on the humor by which this old fool refused to hear me. If I had spoken to him at that moment, and if we had fixed my departure, I should have been obliged to have gone; instead, the sole presence of Charlotte changed the project of going into a project of remaining, as a lamp carried into a room immediately changes this darkness into light. I repeat it, I was convinced that she had absolutely ceased to be interested in me on the one hand, and, on the other, that I was passing through a crisis, not of genuine love, but of wounded vanity, and of morbid brooding. Ah, well! To see her descend from the carriage before the _perron_, to see that my presence overcame her, as hers affected me, I understood two things: first, that it would be physically impossible for me to leave the château while she should be there; then that she had passed through trouble similar to mine, if not worse. She must have fled from me with the most sincere courage, not to have replied to my letters, not to have read them, to have become betrothed in order to place an insurmountable barrier between us, to have believed even that she no longer loved me, and to have returned to the château with this persuasion. She loved me! I had no need of a detailed analysis like those in which I was too complaisant and in which I was so much deceived, to recognize this fact. It was an intuition, sudden, unreasoning, invincible, one to make me believe that the theories on the double life, so much discussed by Science, are absolutely true. I read it, this unhoped for love, in the troubled eyes of this child, as your read the words by which I am trying to reproduce here the lightning and the thunderbolt of this evidence. She was before me in her traveling costume, and white, white as this sheet of paper. I should have explained this pallor by the fatigue of the night passed in the carriage, and by her uneasiness at her brother’s illness. Her eyes, in meeting mine, trembled with emotion. That might be offended modesty? She had fallen away, and when she took off her cloak I saw that her dress, a dress which I recognized, was wrinkled around the shoulders. Ah! I, who had believed so strongly in the method, the inductions, and the complications of reasoning, how I felt the omnipotence of instinct against which nothing could provide. She had loved me all the time. She loved me more than ever. What matter that she had not given me her hand at our first meeting; that she had scarcely spoken to me in the vestibule; that she went up the grand staircase with her mother without turning her head?