was weeping. Astounded, he inquired:

"What is the matter?"

She murmured: "Let me alone, it does not concern you."

But he insisted, like a fool: "Oh, Mademoiselle, come, what is the
matter, has anyone annoyed you?"

She repeated impatiently: "Will you keep still?"

Then suddenly, no longer able to resist the despairing sorrow which
drowned her heart, she began to sob so violently, that she could no
longer walk. She covered her face with her hands, panting for
breath, choked by the violence of her despair.

Belvigne stood still at her side, quite bewildered, repeating: "I
don't understand this at all."

But Servigny brusquely came forward: "Let us go home, Mam'zelle, so
that people may not see you weeping in the street. Why do you
perpetrate follies like that when they only make you sad?"

And taking her arm he drew her forward. But as soon as they reached
the iron gate of the villa she began to run, crossed the garden, and
went upstairs, and shut herself in her room. She did not appear
again until the dinner hour, very pale and serious. Servigny had
bought from a country storekeeper a workingman's costume, with
velvet pantaloons, a flowered waistcoat and a blouse, and he adopted
the local dialect. Yvette was in a hurry for them to finish, feeling
her courage ebbing. As soon as the coffee was served she went to her
room again.

She heard the merry voices beneath her window. The Chevalier was
making equivocal jokes, foreign witticisms, vulgar and clumsy. She
listened, in despair. Servigny, just a bit tipsy, was imitating the
common workingman, calling the Marquise "the Missus." And all of a
sudden he said to Saval: "Well, Boss?" That caused a general laugh.

Then Yvette decided. She first took a sheet of paper and wrote:

"Bougival, Sunday, nine o'clock in the evening.
"I die so that I may not become a kept woman.

"YVETTE."

Then in a postscript:

"Adieu, my dear mother, pardon."

She sealed the envelope, and addressed it to the Marquise Obardi.

Then she rolled her long chair near the window, drew a little table
within reach of her hand, and placed upon it the big bottle of
chloroform beside a handful of wadding.

A great rose-tree covered with flowers, climbing as high as her
window, exhaled in the night a soft and gentle perfume, in light
breaths; and she stood for a moment enjoying it. The moon, in its
first quarter, was floating in the dark sky, a little ragged at the
le