be forced to despise his
mother, because of the world which they had deceived for ten years--a
world she never entered but with a beating heart, for fear of the
treatment she would receive after a discovery. To her allusions, to
her prayers, Jenkins had answered at first by phrases, grand gestures:
"Could you distrust me? Is not our engagement sacred?"

He pointed out the difficulty of keeping an act of this importance
secret. Then he shut himself up in a malignant silence, full of cold
anger and violent determinations. The death of the duke, the fall of an
absurd vanity, had struck a final blow at the household; for disaster,
which often brings hearts ready to understand one another nearer,
finishes and completes disunions. And it was indeed a disaster. The
popularity of the Jenkins pearls suddenly stopped, the situation of the
foreign doctor and charlatan, ably defined by Bouchereau in the Journal
of the Academy, and people of fashion looked at each other in fright,
paler from terror than from the arsenic they had imbibed. Already the
Irishman had felt the effect of those counter blasts which make Parisian
infatuations so dangerous.

It was for that reason, no doubt, that Jenkins had judged it wise to
disappear for some time, leaving madame to continue to frequent the
houses still open to them, to gauge and hold public opinion in respect.
It was a hard task for the poor woman, who found everywhere the cool and
distant welcome which she had received at the Hemerlingues. But she did
not complain; thus earning her marriage, she was putting between them as
a last resource the sad tie of pity and common trials. And as she knew
that she was welcomed in the world on account of her talent, of the
artistic distraction she lent to their private parties, she was always
ready to lay on the piano her fan and long gloves, to play some fragment
of her vast repertory. She worked constantly, passing her afternoons
in turning over new music, choosing by preference sad and complicated
harmonies, the modern music which no longer contents itself with being
an art, but becomes a science, and answers better to our nerves, to our
restlessness, than to sentiment.

Daylight flooded the room as a maid brought a card to her mistress;
"Heurteux, business agent."

The gentleman was there, he insisted on seeing madame.

"You have told him the doctor is travelling?"

He had been told, but it was to madame he wished to speak.

"To me?"

Dis