She took my hand in hers with a supplicating gesture. Her fingers were like ice. There was something so decisive in this entrance, such a proof of love in a moment in which I was so excited that I did not reflect, and, without replying to her, I took her in my arms, weeping, my lips sought her lips, and through the most scalding tears I gave her the most loving, the most sincere kisses; that was a moment of infinite ecstasy, of supreme felicity, and as she drew away from me, with the shame at what she had permitted depicted on her face, always wild. “Wretched creature that I am!” said she, “Ah! I must go away! Let me go away! Do not come near me.” “You see that I must die,” I responded, “for you do not love me, you are going to be the wife of another, we shall be separated, and forever.” I took the dark vial from the table and showed it to her by the light of the lamp. “Only a fourth of this flask,” I continued, and it is the remedy for much suffering. “In five minutes it will be ended,” and gently and without making a single gesture that would force her to defend herself: “Go away now, and I thank you for having come. Before a quarter of an hour I shall have ceased to feel what I am feeling now, this intolerable privation of you for so many months. Come, adieu, do not take away my courage.” She had trembled when the flame had lighted up the black liquid. She extended her hand and snatched the flask away, saying: “No! No!” She looked at it, read the inscription on the red label and trembled. Her countenance became still more changed. A wrinkle hollowed itself between her eyebrows. Her lips trembled. Her eyes expressed the agony of a last anxiety, then, in a voice almost harsh, jerking her words as if they were drawn from her by a torturing and irresistible power. “I, too,” said she, “I have suffered much, I have struggled hard. No,” she continued, advancing toward me and taking me by the arm, “you must not go alone, not alone. We will die together. After what I have done, it is all that is left.” She put the vial to her lips, but I took it away from her, and with a smile almost insane she continued: “To die, yes, to die here, near you, with you,” and she approached again, laying her head on my shoulder, so that I felt her soft hair against my cheek. “So! Ah! it is a long time that I have loved you, so long I can tell you the truth now, since I shall pay for it with my life. You will take me with you, we will go away together, both of us.”