, I said to myself, who has played that trick upon me,
but how has she contrived to know that I am the lover of C---- C----? Has
C---- C---- betrayed my secret? But if she has betrayed it, how could
M---- M---- deprive herself of the pleasure of seeing me, and consent to
her place being taken by her friend and rival? That cannot be a mark of
kind compliance, for a woman never carries it to such an extreme. I see
in it only a mark of contempt--a gratuitous insult.

My self-love tried hard to imagine some reason likely to disprove the
possibility of that contempt, but in vain. Absorbed in that dark
discontent, I believed myself wantonly trifled with, deceived, despised,
and I spent half an hour silent and gloomy, staring at C---- C----, who
scarcely dared to breathe, perplexed, confused, and not knowing in whose
presence she was, for she could only know me as the Pierrot whom she had
seen at the ball.

Deeply in love with M---- M----, and having come to the casino only for
her, I did not feel disposed to accept the exchange, although I was very
far from despising C---- C----, whose charms were as great, at least, as
those of M---- M----. I loved her tenderly, I adored her, but at that
moment it was not her whom I wanted, because at first her presence had
struck me as a mystification. It seemed to me that if I celebrated the
return of C---- C---- in an amorous manner, I would fail in what I owed to
myself, and I thought that I was bound in honour not to lend myself to
the imposition. Besides, without exactly realizing that feeling, I was
not sorry to have it in my power to reproach M---- M---- with an
indifference very strange in a woman in love, and I wanted to act in such
a manner that she should not be able to say that she had procured me a
pleasure. I must add that I suspected M---- M---- to be hiding in the
secret closet, perhaps with her friend.

I had to take a decision, for I could not pass the whole night in my
costume of Pierrot, and without speaking. At first I thought of going
away, the more so that both C---- C---- and her friend could not be certain
that I and Pierrot were the same individual, but I soon abandoned the
idea with horror, thinking of the deep sorrow which would fill the loving
soul of C---- C---- if she ever heard I was the Pierrot. I almost fancied
that she knew it already, and I shared the grief which she evidently
would feel in that case. I had seduced her. I had given her the right to
call