break it to-day, when you can listen to me without having the protestation of the most fervent, the most respectful, the most submissive of passions cause you remorse. What I said to you in the garden I say again to-day, adding to it an entreaty which you will not deny. I love you. Let me devote to you what I have left of youth, my whole life. Allow me to be a support in your solitude, a consolation in your melancholy, a second father to your son. Be my wife and I will bless this long trial, which justifies me in repeating to you what I felt on the first day that I met you,--but how could you have failed to suspect it?--I love you, and I never have loved, I never shall love, anybody but you.'" This impassioned harangue, so insistent and so direct, bore little resemblance to the one that Landri had prepared during the long waking hours of the night and in the cold light of dawn, while the express train of the Chemin de Fer de l'Est bore him away from the little garrison town where his destiny had caused him to meet Captain Olier and his charming wife. What diplomatic stages he had marked out for himself beforehand! And he had hurried through them all to go straight to that offer of marriage, put forth, abruptly, with the spontaneity that is more adroit than all the prudence in the world with a woman who loves,--and Valentine loved Landri. She loved him despite complexities upon which we must insist once again in order to avoid the illogical aspects of that woman's nature, loyal even in its subtleties, even to the slightest appearance of coquetry. She loved him, but in a strange ignorance of the elements of love, despite her marriage and maternity. Her union with a man older than herself, arranged by her family, had not caused her to know that total revolution of her existence, after which a woman is truly woman. With her, affection had never been anything more than imaginary. In the chaste and artless delights of this intimacy, without caresses or definite words, with a young man by whom nevertheless she knew that she was loved, and whom she loved, she had found the only pleasure which her sensibility, still altogether mental, could conceive. To tell the whole fact, she loved--and that friendship had sufficed for her! It was inevitable, therefore, that at the first attempt of her alleged "friend" to draw her into the ardent world of complete passion,--and this offer of marriage, under such conditions, was such an attempt,--she should throw herself almost violently back. She ought, however, to have foreseen it, that step which would put an end to the paradoxical and unreliable compromise of conscience devised by her between her conjugal duties and her secret love. Yes, she had foreseen it, and on the day after her husband's death. Her habit of reflection, intensified by the monotony of her semi-recluse existence, had led her to take an almost painful pleasure in a minute scrutiny of