It is a sort of terrible revelation.

In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-day does, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of the unknown, whom I saw one evening sitting on the rose-tree seat, shining, silent--in the presence of love.
It required a great effort on my part not to try, weakly and vainly, to approach Marthe--the impossible dream, the dream of dreams! She has a little love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, and rather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips away from her side; and that day when she sang so much in spite of herself, it was because a little rival was ill.

I am as much a stranger to her girlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy! One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at the doorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world.
* * * * * * One winter's day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging my papers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had not posted, and I threw the useless document on the fire.

When Marie came back in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dry herself, and to revive it for the room's twilight; and the letter, which had been only in part consumed, took fire again.

And suddenly there gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of my writing--"_I love you as much as you love me_!" And it was so clear, the inscription that flamed in the darkness, that it was not worth while even to attempt an explanation.
We could not speak, nor even look at each other! In the fatal communion of thought which seized us just then, we turned aside from each other, even shadow-veiled as we were.