It was not that in the little home she would find her lover less distracted with her beauty, less passionate than in the days which had followed upon the complete surrender. But his kisses, and the sort of frenzy with which he embraced her now, made her afraid. She dreaded to feel the contrast between the ecstasy caused to her lover by physical possession, and the evident weariness of soul which he displayed in their almost daily interviews. It seemed as though the young man were striving to electrify his heart with the desire for her person. When Helen perceived this cruel truth, the enchantment of the hours of meeting suddenly ceased. Sometimes she longed for these meetings with the gloomiest ardour, that she might at least hear her lover's voice lavishing upon her those phrases of intoxication which, at the beginning of their intercourse, had been the adorable music that had exalted her. Then she dreaded these same interviews, and their caresses into which the senses perhaps entered more than the heart.
"Ah! my Armand," she had ventured to say to him, "you love my person more than you love myself."
"Nay, do you not give yourself to me in giving me your person?" he had replied.
Heavens! how gladly would she have asked him: "And you, do you give yourself entirely to me?"
She had paused upon this question. Why interrogate him? Did she not know that he would coax her with these soft blandishments of speech which do not reveal the depths of the heart? Would she succeed in deciphering the meaning this living enigma of a man's character, set thus before her for weal or woe? Cruel heart! would it never yield her its secret? Kisses, however, may be more tender than he who gives them, soft looks may conceal a soul like a veil—and she was so thirsty for truth!
But whence came all this moral anxiety that preyed upon her? Nothing had to all appearance occurred between them, and already she was alternately asking herself:
"Does he love me as much as at first? Does he love me? Has he ever loved me? Can he love me?"
And every minute she struck upon some trifling fact that heightened her doubt. She ceaselessly encountered that mistrust which degraded her, that irony which bruised her, that dryness of heart which reduced her to despair. Some of their friends from Bourges would arrive in Paris, and Alfred would say to De Querne:
"Do not come to-morrow evening; you would be too much bored. We are having some acquaintances from the country."
"When I am going to be in your way," the young man would say to Helen next day, "why do you not give me notice yourself, instead of doing it through your husband?"