.

.
Then he remembered that he had already thought out all these things.
"Listen," he said, in a voice tremulous and rather solemn as if he were making a confession.

"I once imagined two beings who were at the end of their life, and were recalling all they had suffered." "A poem!" she said, discouraged.
"Yes," he said, "one of those which might be so beautiful." It was remarkable to see how animated he became.

For the first time he appeared sincere--when abandoning the living example of their own destiny for the fiction of his imagination.

In referring to his poem, he had trembled.