Thus Emile could more readily conceive the possibility of blowing out his brains before his father's eyes than of yielding to his will. "Very well!" he said to himself, "I will speak to-morrow to this terrible master, and I will speak to him in such a way that I shall be able to appear at Châteaubrun with my head erect." And yet, when the morrow came, Emile, instead of feeling inspired by all the force of his determination, felt so exhausted by insomnia, and so overwhelmed by sadness, that he feared his own weakness and did not speak. Indeed, what can be more painful, when the heart has revelled in a blissful dream, than to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with a cruel reality? When one has enjoyed all by oneself the delicious secret of a chastely hidden passion, to be forced to reveal it in cold blood to those who do not understand it or who scorn it? Whether Emile should make the avowal to his father or to Janille, he must lay bare his heart, filled as it was with a modest languor and a holy ecstasy, to hearts that had never known or had long been closed to sentiments of that nature. And he had dreamed of such a sublime _dénouement_! Should not Gilberte, alone with him under the eye of God, be the first to receive in her heart the sacred word love when it should escape from his lips? The world and the laws of honor, so unfeeling in such cases, were to deprive the virginity of his passion of all that was purest and most ideal about it! He suffered intensely, and it seemed to him that a century of bitter sorrow had elapsed between his dreams of the day before and the gloomy day that was beginning. He mounted his horse, determined to seek at a distance, in some solitary spot, the calm and resignation necessary to enable him to withstand the first shock. He intended to avoid Châteaubrun; but he found himself near the ruin, unconscious how he had come thither. He rode by without turning his head, ascended the rough road where, in the howling storm, he had first seen the château by the light of the lightning flashes. He recognized the rocks behind which he had found shelter with Jean Jappeloup, and he could not realize that more than two months had passed since that night when he was so light-hearted, so self-controlled, so different from what he had since become. He rode on toward Eguzon, in order to see once more the whole of the road he had then passed over, as he had not visited it since. But when he reached the first houses, the sight of the villagers scrutinizing him caused the same thrill of horror and misanthropy which Monsieur de Boisguilbault would have been likely to feel at such a time. He turned sharply into a dark, wooded road at his left and rode into the country, without any definite goal.