Then I saw him, in my mind's eye, as he ought to have been, approaching the scaffold in the dawn, livid, with cropped hair, and bound hands, with the agony of expiation in his eyes, and in front of him the guillotine, black against the pale sky. Instead of this, it was: "Are you in any pain, dearest? At what hour do you want the carriage, Jacques? Mind you wrap yourself up well. Whom shall we ask to dinner on Wednesday?" It was on Wednesday they received their friends that winter and until the spring. Thus spoke the soft voice of my mother, and the evidence of their perfect union tortured me; but the thirst to know was stronger and fiercer than that pain. My suspicions rose to fever heat, and produced in me an irresistible craving to keep him always under my eyes, to inflict the torment of my constant presence upon him. He yielded to this with a facility which always surprised me. Had he sensations analogous to mine? Now, when the whole mystery is unveiled, and I know the part he took in the horrible plot, I understand the torturing kind of attraction which I had for him. He was wholly possessed by the fixed idea of his accomplished crime, and I formed a living portion of that fixed idea, just as he formed a living portion of my dark and continuous reflections. Henceforth he could think only of me, just as I could think of none but him. Our mutual hate drew us together like a mutual love. When we were apart the tempest of wild fancies broke out with too great fury. At least, this was so in my case; and although his presence was painful to me, it stilled at the same time the kind of internal hurricane which hurled me from one extremity of the possible to the other, when he was out of my sight. No sooner was I alone than the wildest projects suggested themselves to me. I had a vision of myself, seizing him by the throat, with the cry of "Assassin! assassin!" and forcing him to confession by violence. I fancied myself inducing M. Massol to resume the abandoned _Instruction_ on my account, and pictured his coming to my mother's house with the new data supplied by me. I fancied myself bribing two or three rascals, carrying off my stepfather and shutting him up in some lonely house in the suburbs of Paris, until he should have confessed the crime. My reason staggered under these vagaries into which the excess of my desire, still further stimulated by the sense of my powerlessness, drove me. And he too must have lived through hours like these; when I was not there, he must have formed and renounced a hundred plans. He asked of himself, "What does he know?" he answered, according to the hours, "He knows all--he knows nothing. What will he do?" and concluded, by turns, either that I would do all, or that I would do nothing. But, when we were together, face to face, the reality asserted itself, and put fancy to flight. We remained together, studying each other, like two animals about to attack each