It filled him with a kind of awe, and the feeling was by no means agreeable.

It was not a feeling to which even a man of Bernard Longueville's easy power of extracting the savour from a sensation could rapidly habituate himself, and for the rest of that night it was far from making of our hero the happy man that a lover just coming to self-consciousness is supposed to be.

It was wrong--it was dishonorable--it was impossible--and yet it was; it was, as nothing in his own personal experience had ever been.

He seemed hitherto to have been living by proxy, in a vision, in reflection--to have been an echo, a shadow, a futile attempt; but this at last was life itself, this was a fact, this was reality.

For these things one lived; these were the things that people had died for.