"I cannot do that: it would be false."
"Then—I don't know what to think!"
"It is no one whom you know; it is a person who is absent from Paris."
"But who comes sometimes?"
"Apparently, since you overheard an outpouring of sentiment."
"Thanks, thanks, Thérèse. Now I am fairly on my feet again; I know who you are and who I am, and, if I must tell you the whole truth, I believe that I love you better so, for you are a woman now, and not a sphinx. Ah! why didn't you speak sooner?"
"Has this passion made such terrible ravages?" said Thérèse, mockingly.
"Why, yes, perhaps! Ten years hence I will tell you about it, Thérèse, and we will laugh together over it."
"Agreed; good-night."
Laurent went to bed in a very tranquil frame of mind and altogether undeceived. He had really suffered on Thérèse's account. He had passionately desired her, but had never dared to let her suspect it. Certainly it was not a meritorious passion. There was as much vanity as curiosity in it. That woman of whom all her friends said: "Whom does she love? I wish it were I, but it is no one," had appeared to him in the guise of a beautiful ideal to be grasped. His imagination had taken fire, his pride had bled with the dread, the almost certainty, of failure.