on, softly, timidly, she slipped into the bed. But hardly had she
lain down when she raised herself from the pillow on her elbow, and,
craning her neck, listened with parted lips. It seemed to her that she
could hear slight sounds of footsteps along the gravel path which she
had heard in the house in the Boulevard de Villiers. She ran to the
window; she saw the Judas tree, the lawn, the garden gate. Knowing what
she was yet to see, she sought to hide her face in her hands, but she
could not raise her arms, and Chevalier's face rose up before her.

CHAPTER XIII

She had returned home in a burning fever. Robert, after dining _en
famille_, had retired to his attic. His nerves were on edge, and he was
badly out of temper as a result of the manner in which Nanteuil had left
him.

His shirt and his clothes, laid out on the bed by his valet, seemed to
be waiting for him in a domestic and obsequious attitude. He began to
dress himself with a somewhat ill-tempered alacrity. He was impatient to
leave the house. He opened his round window, listened to the murmur of
the city, and saw above the roofs the glow which rose into the sky from
the city of Paris. He scented from afar all the amorous flesh gathered,
on this winter's night, in the theatres and the great _cabarets_, the
cafe-concerts and the bars.

Irritated by Felicie's denial of his desires, he had decided to satisfy
them elsewhere, and as he was not conscious of any preference he
believed that his only difficulty would be to make a choice; but he
presently realized that he had no desire for any of the women of his
acquaintance, nor did he even feel any desire for an unknown woman. He
closed his window, and seated himself before the fire.

It was a coke fire; Madame de Ligny, who wore cloaks costing a thousand
pounds, was wont to economize in the matter of her table and her fires.
She would not allow wood to be burned in her house.

He reflected upon his own affairs, to which he had so far given little
or no thought; upon the career he had embraced, and which he beheld
obscurely before him. The Minister was a great friend of his family. A
mountaineer of the Cevennes, brought up on chestnuts, his dazzled eyes
blinked at the flower-bedecked tables of Paris. He was too shrewd and
too wily not to retain his advantage over the old aristocracy, which
welcomed him to its bosom: the advantage of harsh caprices and arrogant
refusals. Ligny knew him, and expected no fav