Page:Pierre.djvu/505

Rh ; while still each, for the time—however unreasonably—might have vaguely supposed the other occupied by one and the same contemplation. Pierre was thinking of the chair-portrait: Isabel, of the living face. Yet Isabel's fervid exclamations having reference to the living face, were now, as it were, mechanically responded to by Pierre, in syllables having reference to the chair-portrait. Nevertheless, so subtile and spontaneous was it all, that neither perhaps ever afterward discovered this contradiction; for, events whirled them so rapidly and peremptorily after this, that they had no time for those calm retrospective reveries indispensable perhaps to such a discovery.

'Is it? is it? can it be?' was the intense whisper of Isabel.

'No, it cannot be, it is not,' replied Pierre; 'one of the wonderful coincidences, nothing more.'

'Oh, by that word, Pierre, we but vainly seek to explain the inexplicable. Tell me: it is! it must be! it is wonderful!'

'Let us begone; and let us keep eternal silence,' said Pierre, quickly; and, seeking Lucy, they abruptly left the place; as before, Pierre, seemingly unwilling to be accosted by anyone he knew, or who knew his companions, unconsciously accelerating their steps while forced for a space to tread the thoroughfares.

II

As they hurried on, Pierre was silent; but wild thoughts were hurrying and shouting in his heart. The most tremendous displacing and revolutionising thoughts were upheaving in him, with reference to Isabel; nor—though at the time he was hardly conscious of such a thing—were these thoughts wholly unwelcome to him.