e loaded revolver which she had bought
a few days previously. The hours went by, the hours struck, and every
sound was hushed in the house. Only the cabs, continued to rumble
through the streets, but their noise was only heard vaguely through the
shuttered and curtained windows.

She waited, full of nervous energy, without any fear of him now,
ready for anything, and almost triumphant, for she had found means of
torturing him continually during every moment of his life.

But the first gleam of dawn came in through the fringe at the bottom of
her curtain without his having come into her room, and then she awoke to
the fact, with much amazement, that he was not coming. Having locked
and bolted her door, for greater security, she went to bed at last and
remained there, with her eyes open, thinking and barely understanding it
all, without being able to guess what he was going to do.

When her maid brought her tea she at the same time handed her a letter
from her husband. He told her that he was going to undertake a longish
journey and in a postscript added that his lawyer would provide her with
any sums of money she might require for all her expenses.

III

It was at the opera, between two acts of "Robert the Devil." In the
stalls the men were standing up, with their hats on, their waistcoats
cut very low so as to show a large amount of white shirt front, in which
gold and jewelled studs glistened, and were looking at the boxes full
of ladies in low dresses covered with diamonds and pearls, who were
expanding like flowers in that illuminated hothouse, where the beauty
of their faces and the whiteness of their shoulders seemed to bloom in
order to be gazed at, amid the sound of the music and of human voices.

Two friends, with their backs to the orchestra, were scanning those
rows of elegance, that exhibition of real or false charms, of jewels,
of luxury and of pretension which displayed itself in all parts of the
Grand Theatre, and one of them, Roger de Salnis, said to his companion,
Bernard Grandin:

"Just look how beautiful the Comtesse de Mascaret still is."

The older man in turn looked through his opera glasses at a tall lady
in a box opposite. She appeared to be still very young, and her striking
beauty seemed to attract all eyes in every corner of the house. Her pale
complexion, of an ivory tint, gave her the appearance of a statue, while
a small diamond coronet glistened on her black hair like a streak o