it is better that you should know all. You will stay here, you will
return to the castle, you will see her again--her!"

"See her! Who?"

"Bettina!"

"Bettina?"

"I adore her, I adore her!"

"Oh, my poor boy!"

"Pardon me for speaking to you of these things; but I tell you as I would
have told my father."

"And then, I have not been able to speak of it to any one, and it stifled
me; yes, it is a madness which has seized me, which has grown upon me,
little by little, against my will, for you know very-well--My God!
It was here that I began to love her. You know, when she came here with
her sister--with the little 'rouleaux' of francs--her hair fell down--and
then the evening, the month of Mary! Then I was permitted to see her
freely, familiarly, and you, yourself, spoke to me constantly of her.
You praised her sweetness, her goodness. How often have you told me that
there was no one in the world better than she is!"

"And I thought it, and I think it still. And no one here knows her
better than I do, for it is I alone who have seen her with the poor.
If you only knew how tender, and how good she is! Neither wretchedness
nor suffering repulse her. But, my dear boy, I am wrong to tell you all