What! Fate takes the trouble to think out the most improbable combinations, sets the most complicated machinery in motion to bring us together; it drags you out of the depths of Germany, and me from Castile, and brings us to a little hotel in a little village in Picardy, the very name of which was unknown to either of us a short time before; we instantly feel that we are made for one another and are certain to be happy together, and yet all these exertions on the part of Fate are to have been in vain?
Never! Our paths crossed each other at a single point, for a moment they were united, it depended on us whether they should always remain so.

And I was to let you go, never to meet again on this side of eternity?
It was not possible, and as you were so clumsy, or so timid, or so self-torturing--" She finished the sentence with a long kiss, at which he closed his eyes once more, and shut out everything but its flame.
Was it calculation, was it her natural instinct ?--suffice it to say that Pilar never by any chance alluded in their conversations to her past.

She was fond of talking, and talked a great deal, and her conversation was always startling, original and vivacious; her power of imagination as lively as her sparkling eyes, springing from the nearest object to the furthest, from the ordinary to the sublime, but never one word escaped her which might remind Wilhelm that she had gone through confessed and unconfessed experiences of every kind, and reached the turning-point of her existence without him.

Her life, it would appear, had only begun with the moment at which he had risen upon her horizon.
What went before that was torn out of the book of memory--one scarcely noticed the gaps where the pages were missing.

She did all she could to make him forget that she was a stranger to him, and to strengthen in him the delusion that she belonged to him, that she was one with him, that it had always been so.