The first idea of Reine, then,--an idea absolute and imperious,--was to forget for ever the man upon whom rested such terrible suspicion. Religion, duty, and the will of her father were so many insurmountable and sacred obstacles which the young girl could not think of braving. Up to that time, her youthful and lively imagination had found inexhaustible nourishment in the strange adventure of the rocks of Ollioules. All the chaste dreams of her young girlhood were, so to speak, concentrated and realised in the person of Erebus, that unknown one, brave and timid at the same time, audacious and charming, who had saved the life of her father. She could not help being touched by the delicate and mysterious persistence with which Erebus had always tried to recall himself to her memory. Doubtless she had never heard the voice of this stranger; doubtless she was ignorant of his mind and character, whether or not they responded to the graces of his person. But in these long reveries in which a young girl thinks of him who has fascinated her, does she not invest him with the most excellent qualities? does she not make him say all that she desires to hear? Thus had Reine thought of Erebus. First she wished to banish him from her thought, but, unfortunately, to yield to a sentiment against which we have struggled is only to render it all the more powerful and irresistible. Reine then loved Erebus, perhaps unconsciously, when the watchman’s fatal revelation showed the object of her love in such unattractive colours. The grandeur of the sacrifice that she was required to make enlightened her as to the power of the affection with which she had, so to speak, played until the fatal moment arrived. For the first time this sudden revelation taught her the depth of her love. Impenetrable mysteries of the human heart! During the first phases of this mysterious love she had regarded her marriage with Honorât as possible. From the moment in which she knew who the unknown one was, from that moment she felt that, notwithstanding the voice of duty ordered her to forget him, the memory of Erebus would henceforth dominate her whole existence, and she could never marry the chevalier. She recognised the truth with terror, that, notwithstanding her efforts to master her feelings, her heart belonged to her no longer, and she was incapable of deceiving Honorât. She wished to make a last sacrifice, to give up the rosary and portrait which she possessed, imposing this resolution upon herself as a sort of expiation of her reserve and reticence toward her father. The young girl suffered much before she was able to fulfil this resolution. In this mental struggle, Reine was walking on the edge of the comice formed by the rocks above the beach on which the waves of the sea were breaking.