the reasons for and against a decision, and she had ended, in the false perspective of solitary meditation, by thinking solely in opposition to her heart. She had ceased to see anything but the force of the objections, the insurmountable difficulties, and she had taken her stand with the party most strongly opposed to her passionate desire. With that she had soothed herself with the chimerical hope of postponing from week to week the explanation which had suddenly forced itself upon her so imperatively. She came to it deeply moved and at the same time prepared, overwhelmed with surprise and, as it were, armored rather than armed with arguments long since thought out. She ran the risk thus of seeming very cold when she was deeply moved, very self-controlled and conventional, when she was all a-quiver. How near to weakness was her borrowed energy from the moment that she began her reply! "You have made me very unhappy, my friend,--for I shall continue to give you in my heart that name which you no longer care for. I do not reproach you. It was I who deceived myself, in thinking that your feeling for me might change, that it had changed. Perhaps such a transformation is not possible. I too have acted in good faith in wishing for it, in longing for it, in hoping for it. You know it, do you not?--Now that dream is at an end." She repeated, as if speaking to herself: "At an end, at an end." And, turning toward Landri: "How do you expect me to permit you to come here now, to indulge myself in those long conversations and that correspondence which were so dear to me, after you have talked to me in this way? One does not try such an experiment twice. Three years ago I was able to believe in an unconscious outbreak of your youth, in an exaltation which would soon subside. To-day, I am no longer able to flatter myself with that illusion. But on one point you are right. The circumstances are no longer the same. If at that time it was my right and my duty to judge severely a declaration which I should have been as culpable to listen to as you were to make it, how can I blame you now for a step in which there is no other feeling for me than respect and esteem? I have not lived much in the world,--enough, however, to realize that the fidelity of a heart like yours, prolonged thus and under such conditions, is no ordinary thing. It touches me far more than I can tell you."--Despite herself, her voice trembled as she let fall those words which signified too clearly: "And I, too, love you."--"But," she continued, firmly, "this interview must be the last, since I cannot answer you with the words that you ask, since in that hand which you offer me I cannot place mine." "Then," he faltered, "if I understand you, you refuse--"