t hurry away and never see them again. But as he
left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched,
suffering look and the young wife's sorrowful voice went with him,
repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief:

"That is known then!"

"Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!" thought Guy.

In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of
the passage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated
foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons. A
fete! And this evening! In the arrival of those flowers for decoration,
at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed
that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear
looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their
hothouse bloom.

Would Adrienne have the courage or strength to undertake the reception
of the evening, within a few hours? Guy was annoyed at having come.

"I could well have waited and kept my anger to myself. The unhappy woman
would have known nothing."

"Bah!" he added. "She is kind, she adores Sulpice, it is only a passing
storm. She will forgive!"

He promised himself, moreover, to return in the evening, to excuse
himself to Adrienne, to comfort her if he could.

"There is some merit, after all, in that," he thought again. "On my
word! I believe I love her and yet I am angry with that animal Vaudrey
for not loving her enough."

She will forgive!--Lissac knew courtesans but he did not know this
woman, energetic as she was under her frail appearance, a child, a
little provincial lost in the life of Paris, lost and, as it were,
absorbed in the hubbub of political circles, smitten with her husband,
who comprehended in her eyes every seduction and superiority, having
given herself entirely and wishing to wholly possess the elect being who
possessed her, in whom she trusted and to whom she gave herself, body
and soul, with all her confidence, her innocence and her modesty. He did
not know what such a sensitive, nervously frail nature could feel on the
first terrible impulses, full of enthusiasm under her exterior coldness,
of resolution concealed under her timid manners, capable of madness,
distracted in spite of her reason and calm; this candor of thought, of
education, and associations that made her, with all her irresistible
attractiveness, the virtuous woman with all her charm.

Adrienne had at first read the journal that had been