rl who was tired with playing, with parted lips and disheveled hair,
and measured the full extent of the stupidity of my hatred and the
sacrilegious madness of my jealousy, my heart softened and I fell into
such a state of profound and absolute distress that I thought I should
have died of it, and large drops of cold perspiration ran down my cheeks
and tears fell from my eyes, and I got up, so that my sobs might not
disturb her rest and wake her.

As this could not continue, however, I told her one day that I felt so
exhausted and ill that I should prefer to sleep in my own room. She
appeared to believe me and merely said:

"As you please, my dear!" but her blue eyes suddenly assumed such an
anxious, such a grieved look, that I turned my head aside, so as not to
see them....

PART XVII

I was again in the old house, _and without her_, in the old house where
Elaine used to spend all her holidays, in the room whose shutters had
not been opened since our departure, seven months ago.

Why did I go there, where the calm of the country, the silence of the
solitude and my recollections, irritated me and recalled my trouble,
where I suffered even more than I did in Paris, and where I thought of
Elaine every moment I seemed to see her and to hear her, in a species of
hallucination.

What did her letters that I had taken out of her writing table, which
she had used as a girl, what did her ball cards which were stuck round
her looking glass, in which she used to admire herself formerly, what
did her dresses, her dressing gowns, and the dusty furniture whose
repose my trembling hands violated, tell me? Nothing, and always
nothing.

At table, I used to speak with the worthy couple who had never left the
mansion and who appeared to look upon themselves as its second masters,
with the apparent good nature of a man who was in love with his wife and
who wished only to speak about her, who took an interest in the smallest
detail of her childhood and youth, with all the jovial familiarity which
encourages peasants to talk, and when a few glasses of white wine had
loosened their tongues they would talk about her, whom they loved as if
she had been their child, and at other times I used to question the
farmers, when they came to settle their accounts.

Had Elaine the bridle on her neck like so many girls had; did she like
the country, were the peasants fond of her, and did she show any
preference for one or the other? Were many