The grandeur of the sacrifice that she was required to make enlightened her as to the power of the affection with which she had, so to speak, played until the fatal moment arrived.
For the first time this sudden revelation taught her the depth of her love.
Impenetrable mysteries of the human heart! During the first phases of this mysterious love she had regarded her marriage with Honorât as possible.
From the moment in which she knew who the unknown one was, from that moment she felt that, notwithstanding the voice of duty ordered her to forget him, the memory of Erebus would henceforth dominate her whole existence, and she could never marry the chevalier.
She recognised the truth with terror, that, notwithstanding her efforts to master her feelings, her heart belonged to her no longer, and she was incapable of deceiving Honorât.
She wished to make a last sacrifice, to give up the rosary and portrait which she possessed, imposing this resolution upon herself as a sort of expiation of her reserve and reticence toward her father.
The young girl suffered much before she was able to fulfil this resolution.
In this mental struggle, Reine was walking on the edge of the comice formed by the rocks above the beach on which the waves of the sea were breaking.
She wore over her dress a sort of brown mantle with a hood turned up on the shoulders. This hood allowed her bare head to be seen, as well as her long brown curls that floated in the wind. Her countenance had an expression of sweet and resigned melancholy; sometimes, however, her blue eyes shone with a new brightness, and she lifted up her noble, beautiful head with an expression of wounded pride.
She loved passionately, but without hope, and she was going to throw to the winds the feeble tokens of this impossible love.