, a gust of crime rushed to his brain,
distorted all his features. He rushed at her, opening and closing his
hands with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins,
in deadly terror, darted toward the door through which the _masseur_ had
just left the room, calling:

"Aristide!"

That cry, that voice, his wife's evident intimacy with his
lieutenant--Jansoulet stopped, his frantic anger passed away, and he
rushed from the room, throwing the doors open, more eager to escape the
disaster and the horror whose presence he felt in his own house, than to
go elsewhere to seek the help that had been promised him.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at Hemerlingue's,
making a despairing gesture in the banker's direction as he entered, and
approached the baroness, stammering the ready-made phrase that he had
heard repeated so often on the evening of his own ball: "His wife was
very ill--in despair that she could not--" She did not give him time to
finish, but rose slowly, like a long, slender snake in the crosswise
folds of her clinging skirt, and said, in her schoolgirl accent, without
looking at him: "Oh! _I_ knew--_I_ knew;" then moved away and paid no
further heed to him. He tried to accost Hemerlingue, but that gentleman
seemed deeply absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Thereupon
he went and sat down beside Madame Jenkins, whose isolation was no less
marked than his. But, while he talked with the poor woman, who was as
languid as he himself was preoccupied, he watched the baroness do the
honors of that salon, so much more comfortable than his own great gilded
halls.

The guests were taking their leave. Madame Hemerlingue escorted some of
the ladies to the door, bent her head beneath the benediction of the
Armenian bishop, bowed smilingly to the young dandies with canes,
bestowed upon every one the proper variety of salutation, with perfect
self-possession; and the poor devil could not avoid a mental comparison
between that Oriental slave become such a thorough Parisian, of such
marked distinction in the most refined society on earth, and that other
woman, the European enervated by the Orient, brutalized by Turkish
tobacco and bloated by a life of sloth. His ambition, his pride as a
husband were disappointed, humiliated in that union of which he now saw
the peril and the emptiness, the last cruel blow of destiny which
deprived him even of the refuge of domestic happiness against