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LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE. 405 acknowledgment from your lips. Once more, mademoi- selle, it is I who ask your forgiveness." "Impossible, impossible!" she cried, "you are mocking me." "How, impossible?" "Yes, it is impossible to be good, and excellent, and per- fect to such a degree as that." "Take care!" said Eaoul, with a bitter smile, "for pres- ently you may say, perhaps, I did not love you." "Oh! you love me like an affectionate brother; let me hope that, Eaoul." "As a brother! Undeceive yourself, Louise; I loved you as a lover — as a husband, with the deepest, the truest, the fondest affection." "Eaoul, Eaoul!" "As a brother! Oh, Louise! I loved you so deeply that I would have shed my blood for you, drop by drop; I would, oh! how willingly, have suffered myself to be torn to pieces for your sake, have sacrificed my very future for you. I loved you so deeply, Louise, that my heart feels dead and crushed within me — that my faith in human nature is gone — that my eyes seem to have lost their light; I loved you so deeply that I now no longer see, think of, care for any- thing, either in this world or in the next." "Eaoul — dear Eaoul, spare me, I implore you!" cried La Valliere. "Oh! if I had but known." "It is too late, Louise; you love, you are happy in your affection; I read your happiness through your tears — behind the tears which the loyalty of your nature makes you shed; I feel the sighs which your affection breathes forth. Louise, Louise, you have made me the most abjectly wretched man living; leave me, I entreat you. Adieu! adieu!" "Forgive me! oh, forgive me, Eaoul, for what I have done!" "Have I not done more? Have I not told you that I loved you still?" She buried her face in her hands. "And to tell you that — do you hear me, Louise? — to tell you that, at such a moment as this, to tell you that, as I have told you, is to pronounce my own sentence of death. Adieu!" La Valliere wished to hold out her hands to him. "We ought not to see each other again in this world," he said; and as she was on the point of calling out in bitter agony at this remark, he placed his hand on her mouth to stifie the exclamation.