that these lovely eyes
conceal a soul of filth! Ah, who would not have been deceived, as
I was? Bertha, what did you dream of when you were sleeping in my
arms? Tremorel came, and you thought you saw in him the ideal of
your dreams. You admired the precocious wrinkles which betrayed an
exhausted life, like the fatal seal which marks the fallen
archangel's forehead. Your love, without thought of mine, rushed
toward him, though he did not think of you. You went to evil as if
it were your nature. And yet I thought you more immaculate than
the Alpine snows. You did not even have a struggle with yourself;
you betrayed no confusion which would reveal your first fault to
me. You brought me your forehead soiled with his kisses without
blushing."

Weariness overcame his energies; his voice became little by little
feebler and less distinct.

"You had your happiness in your hands, Bertha, and you carelessly
destroyed it, as the child breaks the toy of whose value he is
ignorant. What did you expect from this wretch for whom you had
the frightful courage to kill me, with a kiss upon your lips,
slowly, hour by hour? You thought you loved him, but disgust
ought to have come at last. Look at him, and judge between us.
See which is the--man--I, extended on this bed where I shall
soon die, or he shivering there in a corner. You have the energy
of crime, but he has only the baseness of it. Ah, if my name was
Hector de Tremorel, and a man had spoken as I have just done,
that man should live no longer, even if he had ten revolvers like
this I am holding to defend himself with!"

Hector, thus taunted, tried to get up and reply; but his legs would
not support him, and his throat only gave hoarse, unintelligible
sounds. Bertha, as she looked at the two men, recognized her error
with rage and indignation. Her husband, at this moment, seemed to
her sublime; his eyes gleamed, his face was radiant; while the other
--the other! She felt sick with disgust when she but glanced toward
him.

Thus all these deceptive chimeras after which she had run, love,
passion, poetry, were already hers; she had held them in her hands
and she had not been able to perceive it. But what was Sauvresy's
purpose?

He continued, painfully:

"This then, is our situation; you have killed me, you are going to
be free, yet you hate and despise each other--"

He stopped, and seemed to be suffocating; he tried to raise himself
on his pillow and to sit up in bed, bu