n the marble mantelpiece. She gazed
at the neck of her husband. On the white skin she had just caught sight
of a pink spot. The rush of blood to the head, increased the size of
this spot, turning it bright red.

"Kiss me, kiss me," repeated Laurent, his face and neck scarlet.

The young woman threw her head further back, to avoid an embrace,
and pressing the tip of her finger on the bite Camille had given her
husband, addressed him thus:

"What have you here? I never noticed this wound before."

It seemed to Laurent as if the finger of Therese was boring a hole in
his throat. At the contact of this finger, he suddenly started backward,
uttering a suppressed cry of pain.

"That," he stammered, "that----"

He hesitated, but he could not lie, and in spite of himself, he told the
truth.

"That is the bite Camille gave me. You know, in the boat. It is nothing.
It has healed. Kiss me, kiss me."

And the wretch craned his neck which was burning him. He wanted Therese
to kiss the scar, convinced that the lips of this woman would appease
the thousand pricks lacerating his flesh, and with raised chin he
presented his extended neck for the embrace. Therese, who was almost
lying back on the marble chimney-piece, gave a supreme gesture of
disgust, and in a supplicating voice exclaimed:

"Oh! no, not on that part. There is blood."

She sank down on the low chair, trembling, with her forehead between
her hands. Laurent remained where he stood for a moment, looking stupid.
Then, all at once, with the clutch of a wild beast, he grasped the head
of Therese in his two great hands, and by force brought her lips to the
bite he had received from Camille on his neck. For an instant he kept,
he crushed, this head of a woman against his skin. Therese had given
way, uttering hollow groans. She was choking on the neck of Laurent.
When she had freed herself from his hands, she violently wiped her
mouth, and spat in the fire. She had not said a word.

Laurent, ashamed of his brutality, began walking slowly from the bed
to the window. Suffering alone--the horrible burn--had made him exact a
kiss from Therese, and when her frigid lips met the scorching scar,
he felt the pain more acutely. This kiss obtained by violence had just
crushed him. The shock had been so painful, that for nothing in the
world would he have received another.

He cast his eyes upon the woman with whom he was to live, and who sat
shuddering, doubled up before the