Gaston's curiosity, a kind of
fascination he finds in their dark ways, takes him among them on
occasion, to feel all the more keenly the contrast of that picture-
like prettiness in this framing of their grim company, their grim
abode. Her frivolity is redeemed by a sensitive affection for these
people who protect her, by a self-accusing respect for their
religion, for the somewhat surly goodness, the hard and unattractive
pieties into which she cannot really enter; and she yearns after her
like, for those harmless forbidden graces towards which she has a
natural aptitude, loses her heart to Gaston as he goes to and fro,
wastes her days in reminiscence of that bright passage, notes the
very fineness of his linen. To him, in turn, she seems, as all
longing creatures ever have done, to have some claim upon him--a
right to consideration--to an effort on his part: he finds a sister
to encourage: she touches him, clings where she touches. The gloomy,
honest, uncompromising Huguenot brothers interfere just in time to
save her from the consequence of what to another than Gaston might
have counted as only a passing fondness to be soon forgotten; and the
marriage almost forced upon him seemed under its actual conditions no
binding sacrament.
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