Twice in the last month, had M. de La Tour d'Azyr gone to visit
the Lord of Gavrillac at Meudon, and the sight of Aline, so sweet
and fresh, so bright and of so lively a mind, had caused those
embers smouldering under the ashes of the past, embers which
until now he had believed utterly extinct, to kindle into flame
once more. He desired her as we desire Heaven. I believe that
it was the purest passion of his life; that had it come to him
earlier he might have been a vastly different man. The cruelest
wound that in all his selfish life he had taken was when she
sent him word, quite definitely after the affair at the Feydau,
that she could not again in any circumstances receive him. At
one blow - through that disgraceful riot - he had been robbed of a
mistress he prized and of a wife who had become a necessity to the
very soul of him. The sordid love of La Binet might have consoled
him for the compulsory renunciation of his exalted love of Aline,
just as to his exalted love of Aline he had been ready to sacrifice
his attachment to La Binet.
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