nd attraction only needed to seize her, and what, then,
would become of constancy and truth? If he had doubted her before, he
was now suspicious from a different cause, and in quite a different
way. The face of the trim little man who had sat beside her, and smiled
at her, was persistently present to him. He did not question her
further; but the poison worked the more surely in secret; he never for
an instant forgot; and jealousy, now wide awake, had at last a definite
object to lay hold of.

In his lucid moments, he knew that he was making her life a burden to
her. What wonder if she did, ultimately, turn from him? But his evil
moods were now beyond command. He began to suspect deceit in her
actions as well as in what she said. The idea that this other, this
smirking, wax-faced man, might somehow steal her from him, hung over
him like a fog, obscuring his vision. It necessitated continued
watchfulness on his part. And so he dogged her, mentally, and in fact
until his own heart all but broke under the strain.

One afternoon they walked to Connewitz. It had rained heavily during
the night, and the unpaved roads were inchdeep in mud. The sky was a
level sheet of cloud, darker and more forbidding in the east.

Their direction was Maurice's choice. Louise would have liked better to
keep to the town: for, though the streets, too, were mud-bespattered,
there would soon be lights, and the reflection of lights in damp
pavements. She yielded, however, without even troubling to express her
wish. But just because of the dirt and naked ugliness which met her, at
every turn, she was voluble and excited; and an exaggerated hilarity
seized her at trifles. Maurice, who had left the house in a more
composed frame of mind than usual, gradually relapsed, at her want of
restraint, into silence. He suffered under her looseness of tongue and
laughter: her sallow, heavy-eyed face was ill-adapted to such moods;
below her feverish animation there lurked, he was sure of it, a deadly
melancholy. He had always been rendered uneasy by her spurts of gaiety.
Now in addition, he asked himself: what has happened to make her like
this?

Feeling his hostility, Louise grew quieter, and soon she, too, was
silent. Having gained his end, Maurice wished to atone for it, and
slipping his arm through hers, he took her hand. For a few steps they
walked on in this fashion. Then, he received one of those sudden
impressions which flash on us from time to time,