s, but I only replied coldly:

"Do you not know, Elaine?... Did you not think that sooner or later I
should discover everything that you have been trying to hide from me?"

She sat up in terror, and repeated as if she were in a profound stupor:

"What have I been trying to hide from you?"

I had said too much, and was bound to go on to the end and to finish,
even though I repented of it ever afterwards, and amidst the noise of
the carriage I said in a hoarse voice:

"Is it not your fault if I have become estranged from you, shall not I
be the only one to be unhappy, I who loved you so dearly, who believed
in you, and whom you have deceived, and condemned to take another man's
mistress?"

Elaine closed my mouth with my fingers, and panting, with dilated eyes
and with such a pale face that I thought she was going to faint, she
said hoarsely:

"Be quiet, be quiet, you are frightening me,... frightening me as if you
were a madman...."

Those words froze me, and I shivered as if some phantoms were appearing
among the trees and showing me the place that had been marked out for me
by Destiny, and I felt inclined to jump from the carriage and to run to
the river, which was calling to me yonder in a maternal voice, and
inviting me to an eternal sleep, eternal repose, but Elaine called out
to the coachman:

"We will go home, Firmin; drive as fast as you can!"

We did not exchange another word, and during the whole drive Elaine
sobbed convulsively, though she tried to hide the sound with her pocket
handkerchief, and I understood that it was all finished _and that I had
killed our love_....

PART XXI

Yes, all was finished and stupidly finished, without the decisive
explanation, in which I should find strength to escape from a hateful
yoke, and to repudiate the woman who had allured me with false caresses,
and who no longer ought to bear my name.

It was either that, or else, who knows, the happiness, the peace, the
love which was not troubled by any evil afterthoughts, that absolute
love that I dreamt of between Elaine and myself when I asked for her
hand, and which I was still continually dreaming of with the despair of
a condemned soul far from Paradise, and from which I was suffering, and
which would kill me.

She prevented me from speaking; with her trembling hand she checked
that flow of frenzied words which were about to come from my pained
heart, those terrible accusations which an imperious, resistless