ough to remove from my mind the
very shadow of suspicion. She was talking quietly in the center of a
group. She greeted me with her usual gentle smile. I felt relieved of an
immense weight. I was escaping a torment of such a painful and bitter
nature, that the positive impression of my previous grief, freed from the
disgraceful complications with which I had for a moment thought it
aggravated, appeared almost pleasant. Never had my heart rendered to this
woman a more tender and more sincere homage. I was grateful to her from
the bottom of my soul, for having restored purity to my wound and to my
memory.

The afternoon was to be devoted to a horseback ride along the sea-shore.
In the effusion of heart that succeeded the anxieties of the night, I
yielded quite readily to the entreaties of Monsieur de Malouet, who,
arguing on my approaching departure, was urging me to accompany him on
this excursion. It was about two o'clock when our cavalcade, recruited as
usual by a few young men of the neighborhood, marched out of the chateau's
gate. We had been traveling merrily for a few minutes, and I was not the
least merry of the band, when Madame de Palme suddenly came to take her
place by my side.

"I am about to be guilty of a base deed," she said; "and yet, I had so
strongly resolved--but I am choking!"

I looked at her; the haggard expression of her eyes and of her features
suddenly struck me with terror.

"Well!" she went on, in a voice of which I shall never forget the tone,
"you have willed it so! I am a disgraced woman!"

She urged at once her horse forward, leaving me crushed by this blow, the
more terrible that I had wholly ceased to fear it, and that it struck me
with a keen cruelty I had not even foreseen. There had indeed been in the
unhappy woman's voice no trace whatever of insolent swaggering; it was the
very voice of despair, a cry of heart-rending grief and timid reproach;
everything that might add in my soul to the torture of a stained and
shattered love, the disorder of a profound pity and an uneasy conscience.

When I had found strength enough to look around me I was surprised at my
own blindness. Among Madame de Palme's most assiduous courtiers, figures
one Monsieur de Mauterne, whose antipathy for me, though confined within
the limits of good-breeding, often seemed to me to assume an almost
hostile tinge. Monsieur de Mauterne is a man of my age, tall, blonde, with
a figure more robust than elegant, and