said Raoul.

“Why, it is that it tells everything, except the thing which exhales, like a mortal poison from your eyes and from your heart; except the senseless love which still consumes you.” Raoul grew paler, but remained silent.

“Why did you not write simply these words:

“‘MADEMOISELLE, — Instead of cursing you, I love you and I die.’“

“That is true,” exclaimed Raoul, with a sinister kind of joy.

And tearing the letter he had just taken back, he wrote the following words upon a leaf of his tablets:

“To procure the happiness of once more telling you I love you, I commit the baseness of writing to you; and to punish myself for that baseness, I die.”