"This," I said; "but first tell me frankly how you wish me to love
you."

"Love me as my aunt loved me; I gave you her rights when I permitted
you to call me by the name which she chose for her own among my
others."

"Then I am to love without hope and with an absolute devotion. Well,
yes; I will do for you what some men do for God. I shall feel that you
have asked it. I will enter a seminary and make myself a priest, and
then I will educate your son. Jacques shall be myself in his own form;
political conceptions, thoughts, energy, patience, I will give him
all. In that way I shall live near to you, and my love, enclosed in
religion as a silver image in a crystal shrine, can never be suspected
of evil. You will not have to fear the undisciplined passions which
grasp a man and by which already I have allowed myself to be
vanquished. I will consume my own being in the flame, and I will love
you with a purified love."

She turned pale and said, hurrying her words: "Felix, do not put
yourself in bonds that might prove an obstacle to our happiness. I
should die of grief for having caused a suicide like that. Child, do
you think despairing love a life's vocation? Wait for life's trials
before you judge of life; I command it. Marry neither the Church nor a
woman; marry not at all,--I forbid it. Remain free. You are twenty-one
years old--My God! can I have mistaken him? I thought two months
sufficed to know some souls."

"What hope have you?" I cried, with fire in my eyes.