ith the accents of farewell in her melancholy face:

"As you do not love me any more, why not tell me so, at once, instead of
wounding me like this by small, traitorous blows, and, above all, why
continue to live together?...You want your liberty, and I will give it
to you; you have your fortune, and I have mine. Let us separate without
a scandal and without a lawsuit, so that, at least, a little friendship
may survive our love...I shall leave Paris and go and live in the
country with my mother.... God is my witness, however, that I still love
you, my poor George, as much as ever, and that I shall remain your wife,
whether I am with you, or separated from you!"

George hesitated for a few moments before replying, with an uneasy, sad
look on his face, and then said, turning away his head:

"Yes, perhaps it will be best for both of us!"

They voluntarily broke their marriage contract, as she had heroically
volunteered to do. She kept her resolution, exiled herself, buried
herself in obscurity, accepted the trial with calm fortitude, and was as
resigned as only faithful and devoted souls can be.

They wrote to each other, and she deluded herself, pursued the chimera
that George would return to her, would call her back to his side, would
escape from his former associates, would understand of what deep love he
had voluntarily deprived himself, and would love her again as he had
formerly loved her; and she resisted all the entreaties and the advice
of her friends, to cut such a false position short, and to institute a
suit for divorce against her husband, as the issue would be certain.

He, at the end of a few months of solitude, of evanescent love affairs,
when to beguile his loneliness, a man passes from the arms of one woman
to those of another, had set up a new home, and had tied himself to a
woman whom he had accidentally met at a party of friends, and who had
managed to please him and to amuse him.

His deserted wife was naturally not left in ignorance of the fact, and,
stifling her jealousy and her grief, she put on a smile, and thought
that it would be the same with this one as it had been with all his
other ephemeral mistresses, whom her husband had successively got rid
of.

Was not that, after all, the best thing to bring about the issue which
she longed and hoped for? Would not that doubtful passion, that close
intimacy certainly make Monsieur d'Hardermes compare the woman he
possessed with the woman he had