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 BOOK X

THE UNPRECEDENTED FINAL RESOLUTION OF PIERRE

I

be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest gloom precedes the day. We care not whether the saying will prove true to the utmost bounds of things; sufficient that it sometimes does hold true within the bounds of earthly finitude.

Next morning Pierre rose from the floor of his chamber, haggard and tattered in body from his past night's utter misery, but stoically serene and symmetrical in soul, with the foretaste of what then seemed to him a planned and perfect Future. Now he thinks he knows that the wholly unanticipated storm which had so terribly burst upon him, had yet burst upon him for his good; for the place, which in its undetected incipiency, the storm had obscurely occupied in his soul, seemed now clear sky to him; and all his horizon seemed distinctly commanded by him.

His resolution was a strange and extraordinary one; but therefore it only the better met a strange and extraordinary emergency. But it was not only strange and extraordinary in its novelty of mere aspect, but it was wonderful in its unequalled renunciation of himself.

From the first, determined at all hazards to hold his father's fair fame inviolate from anything he should do in reference to protecting Isabel, and extending to her a brother's utmost devotedness and love; and equally determined not to shake his mother's lasting peace by 5em