talked of dying with such self-abandonment.

"Do you love him so dearly?" he said, in an indefinably milder tone.
"Do you love this Fromont so dearly that you prefer to die rather than
renounce him?"

She drew herself up hastily.

"I? Love that fop, that doll, that silly girl in men's clothes?
Nonsense!--I took him as I would have taken any other man."

"Why?"

"Because I couldn't help it, because I was mad, because I had and still
have in my heart a criminal love, which I am determined to tear out, no
matter at what cost."

She had risen and was speaking with her eyes in his, her lips near his,
trembling from head to foot.

A criminal love?--Whom did she love, in God's name?

Frantz was afraid to question her.

Although suspecting nothing as yet, he had a feeling that that glance,
that breath, leaning toward him, were about to make some horrible
disclosure.

But his office of judge made it necessary for him to know all.

"Who is it?" he asked.

She replied in a stifled voice:

"You know very well that it is you."

She was his brother's wife.

For two years he had not thought of her except as a sister. In his eyes
his brother's wife in no way resembled his former fiancee, and it would
have been a crime to recognize in a single feature of her face the woman
to whom he had formerly so often said, "I love you."

And now it was she who said that she loved him.

The unhappy judge was thunderstruck, dazed, could find no words in which
to reply.

She, standing before him, waited.

It was one of those spring days, full of heat and light, to which the
moisture of recent rains imparts a strange softness and melancholy.
The air was warm, perfumed by fresh flowers which, on that first day of
heat, gave forth their fragrance eagerly, like violets hidden in a muff.
Through its long, open windows the room in which they were inhaled all
those intoxicating odors. Outside, they could hear the Sunday organs,
distant shouts on the river, and nearer at hand, in the garden, Madame
Dobson's amorous, languishing voice, sighing:

"On dit que tu te maries;
Tu sais que j'en puis mouri-i-i-r!"

"Yes, Frantz, I have always loved you," said Sidonie. "That love which
I renounced long ago because I was a young girl--and young girls do
not know what they are doing--that love nothing has ever succeeded in
destroying or lessening. When I learned that Desiree also loved you,
the unfortunate, penniless child