at a young married
woman's conduct should be, to conceal the fact.

This openness on his wife's part was at once Jacques' consolation and
opportunity for endless self-torture.

For three long miserable months he had wrestled with those ignoble
questionings only the jealous know, now accepting as probable, now
rejecting with angry self-rebuke, the thought that his wife suffered,
perhaps even returned, Dupre's love. And to-day, instead of finding his
jealousy allayed by her half-confidence, he felt more wretched than he
had ever been.

His horses responded to his mood, and going down the steep hill which
leads into the town of Falaise they shied violently at a heap of stones
they had passed sedately a dozen times or more. Jacques de Wissant
struck them several cruel blows with the whip he scarcely ever used, and
the groom, looking furtively at his master's set face and blazing eyes,
felt suddenly afraid.

III

It was one o'clock, and the last of the wedding parties had swept gaily
out of the great _salle_ of the Falaise town hall and so to the
Cathedral across the market place.

Jacques de Wissant, with a feeling of relief, took off his tricolor
badge of office. With the instinctive love of order which was
characteristic of the man, he gathered up the papers that were spread on
the large table and placed them in neat piles before him. Through the
high windows, which by his orders had been prised open, for it was
intensely hot, he could hear what seemed an unwonted stir outside. The
picturesque town was full of strangers; in addition to the usual
holiday-makers from the neighbourhood, crowds of Parisians had come down
to spend the Feast of the Assumption by the sea.

The Mayor of Falaise liked to hear this unwonted stir and movement, for
everything that affected the prosperity of the town affected him very
nearly; but he was constitutionally averse to noise, and just now he
felt very tired. The varied emotions which had racked him that morning
had drained him of his vitality; and he thought with relief that in a
few moments he would be in the old-fashioned restaurant just across the
market place, where a table was always reserved for him when his town
house happened to be shut up, and where all his tastes and dietetic
fads--for M. de Wissant had a delicate digestion--were known.

He took up his tall hat and his lemon-coloured gloves--and then a look
of annoyance came over his weary face, for he heard the swingi