eption."

Ah! although this woman were ready to tell him everything, Vaudrey felt
sure that her confidence could only intensify the love that he felt. She
had risen, her arms were crossed over her black gown whose red velvet
trimming suggested open wounds, her ardent eyes were in strong contrast
with her pale face, her lips of unusually heightened color expressed a
strange sensuality that invited a kiss, while her nostrils dilated under
the impulse of bitter anger--standing thus, she began to narrate her
life to Vaudrey who was seated in front of her, looking up to her--as if
at her knees. Her story was a sad one of a wicked childhood, ignorant
youth, wasted early years, melancholy, sins, outbursts of faith, falls,
returns of love, pride, virtue, restitution through repentance, scourged
hopes, dead confidences, the entire heartrending existence of a woman
who had left more of her heart than of the flesh of her body clinging to
the nails of her calvaries:--all, though ordinary and commonplace, was
so cruel in its truth that it appealed at once to Sulpice's heart, a
heart bursting with pity, to that credulous man who was attracted by all
that seemed to him so exquisitely painful and new about this woman.

"Perhaps I am worrying you?" she asked abruptly.

"You!" said he.

He looked at her with a tear in his eye.

Marianne's eyes gleamed with a sudden light.

"Well!" she said, "such is my life! I have loved, I have been betrayed.
I have had faith in some one and I awakened one fine morning with this
prospect before me: to sink in the deep mud or to do like so many
others,--to take a lover and save myself through luxury, since I could
not recover myself through passion. Bah! the world shows more leniency
toward those who succeed than toward those who repent. All that is
necessary is to succeed, and on my word--you know Monsieur de Rosas
well?"

"No," stammered Vaudrey, before whose mind the duke's blond face
appeared.

"You heard him the other evening!"

"I mean that I have never spoken to him. Well! what of Monsieur de
Rosas?"

"Monsieur de Rosas loved me. Oh!" she said, interrupting a gesture made
by Vaudrey, "wait. He said that he loved me. He is rich. Why should I
not have been Rosas's mistress? Deal for deal, that was a good bargain,
at least! I accept Rosas! It was to receive him that I was foolish
enough to make my purchases without reckoning, without knowing. What's
that for a Rosas?" she said, as she cr