A LOVE CRIME. Paul Bourget

a free expansiveness after a lengthened

      constraint, she said:

      "How do you do, Armand. Are you in love with me to-day?"

      "And yourself," he questioned, "are you in love with me?"

      He was caressing the hand of the young woman who had thrown herself upon

      the ground, and with her head resting on her lover's knees, was looking

      at him in a fever of ecstasy.

      "Ah! you flirt," she returned, "I have no need to tell you so to have

      you believe it."

      "No," he replied, "I know that you love me--much--though not enough to

      go all lengths with the feeling."

      The tone in which he uttered this sentence was marked with an irony

      which made it palpably an epigram. It was an allusion to oft-stated

      complaints. Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the

      smile of a woman who has her answer ready.

      "So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she

      was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of

      melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot

      believe in my feelings without this last proof?"

      "Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift

      of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. It is true," he

      went on with a more gloomy air, "so long as you refuse to be entirely

      mine I shall suspect--not your sincerity, for I think that you think you

      love me, but the truth of this love. Too often people imagine that they

      have feelings which they have not. Ah! if you loved me, as you say, and

      as you think, would you deny me yourself as you do? Would you refuse me

      the meeting that I have asked of you more than twenty times? Why you

      would grant it as much for your own sake as for mine."

      "Armand--" she began thus, then stopped, blushing.

      She had risen and was walking about the room without looking at her

      lover, her arms apart from her body with the backs of her hands laid on

      her hips, as was usual with her at moments of intense thought. Since she

      had begun to love, and had acknowledged her feelings to Monsieur de

      Querne she was quite aware that she must some day give up her beautiful

      dream of an attachment which, though forbidden, should remain pure. Yes,

      she knew that she must give her entire self after giving her heart, and

      become the mistress of the man whom she had suffered to say to her: "I

      love you." She knew it, and she had found strength for the prolonging of

      her resistance to that day, not in coquetry--no woman was less capable

      of speculating with a man's ungratified desire in order to kindle his

      passion--but in the persistence of the duty-sense within her.

      Where is the married woman who has not fondled this chimera of a

      reconciliation between the infidelity of heart and the faith sworn to her

      husband? The renunciation of the delights of complete love seems at

      first to her a sufficient expiation. She engages in adultery believing

      that she will not pass beyond a certain limit, and she does in fact keep

      within it a longer or a shorter time according to the disposition of the

      man she loves. But the inflexible logic that governs life resumes its

      rights. Soul and body do not separate, and love admits of no other law

      than itself.

      Yes, the fatal hour had struck for Helen, and she felt it. How many

      times during the last fortnight had she had this horrible discussion

      with Armand, who always ended by requiring from her this last token of

      love? She was sensible that after each of these scenes she had been

      lessened in the eyes of this man. A few more, and he would lose

      completely his faith in the feeling which she entertained towards him, a

      feeling that was absolute and unreasoned; for she loved him, as women

      alone are capable of loving, with such a love as is almost in the nature

      of a bewitchment, and is the outcome of an irresistible longing to

      afford happiness to the person who is thus loved. She loved him and she

      loved to love him. Pain in those beloved eyes was physically intolerable

      to her, and intolerable also mistrust, which betokened the shrinking

      back of his soul.

      She had taken account of all this, she had looked the necessity for her

      guilt in the face, and she had resolved to offer herself to her

      "beloved," as in her letters she always called him, because "friend" was

      too cold, and the word "lover" purpled her heart with shame,--yes, to

      offer him the supreme proof of tenderness that he asked for, and now,

      when on the point of consenting, she was impotent. Her will was failing

      at the last moment. Was she going again to begin what she used to call,

      when she thought about it, a hateful contract? Ah! why was she not

      free--free, that is, from duties towards her child, the only being whom

      she could not sacrifice to him whom she loved--free to offer this man

      not a clandestine interview but a flight together, a complete sacrifice

      of her entire life.

      All these thoughts came and went in her poor head while she herself was

      walking to and fro in the room. She looked again at her lover. She

      fancied she could see a change come over the features of the countenance

      she idolised.

      "Armand," she resumed, "do not be sad. I consent to all that you wish."

      These words, which were uttered in the deep voice of a woman probing to

      the inmost chamber of her heart, appeared to astonish the young man even

      more than they moved him. He wrapped Helen in his strange gaze. If the

      poor woman had had strength enough to observe him she would not have

      encountered in those keen eyes the divine emotion which atones for the

      guilt of the mistress by the happiness of the lover. It was just the

      same gaze, at once contemptuous and inquisitive, with which he had

      lately contemplated the group formed by Alfred and Helen. But the latter

      was too much confused by what she had just said to keep cool enough for

      observing