"What is the matter?" asked d'Arthez; "you seem distressed."

"I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan," she replied.
"However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of
his exile--without family, without son--from his native land."

These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility.
D'Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to
speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know the
height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus
forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with
frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels.
Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first
tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself,
trembled as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful
Diane with its curving finger-tips, and said,--

"Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have
suffered?"

"Yes," she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most
mellifluous note that Tulou's flute had ever sighed.

Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained
in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the
occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds
slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the
wounded lamb was kneeling at the divine feet.

"Well?" he said, in a soft, still voice.