nter the room suddenly, to throw herself
between these men and interrupt their conversation. She had not the
strength. And then, what Lissac said had the effect of consoling
her!--Guy's reproaches to Sulpice were such as she would have liked to
cast at him, if she could have found speech now. But not a word could
she frame. She was stunned, dumb and like a crushed being. She knew only
one thing, that she suffered horribly, as she had never before suffered.

At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told
him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down. Then she
gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense
of outraged modesty.

Vaudrey tried to speak. At first only confused words, silly excuses,
clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases--_caprices_, _nothing serious_,
_whim_, _madness_--so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips. But
then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was
speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.

"Will you never forgive me?" he asked at last, not knowing too well what
he said.

"Never!" she said coldly.

She rose and with as much sudden energy as but a moment before she had
felt of weakness, she crossed the room.

"Are you going away?" stammered Sulpice.

"Yes, I must be alone--Ah! quite alone," she said, with a sort of
gesture of disgust as she saw her husband approach her.

He stopped and said, as if by chance:

"You know that--this evening--"

"Yes, yes," she replied, "do not be anxious about anything! I am still
the minister's wife, if I am Madame Vaudrey no longer."

He tried in vain to reply.

Adrienne had already disappeared.

"There is the end of my happiness!" Sulpice stammered as he suddenly
confronted an unknown situation dark as an abyss. "Ah! how wretched I
am! Very wretched! whose fault is it?"

He plunged gladly into the work of examining the bundles of reports from
the prefects, feverishly inspecting them to deafen and blind his
conscience, and seized at every moment with a desire to make an appeal
to Adrienne or to go and insult Marianne. Oh! especially to tell
Marianne that she had betrayed him, that she was a wretch, that she was
the mistress of Rosas, the mistress of Jouvenet, a strumpet like any
other strumpet, yes, a strumpet!

Amid all the disturbance of that day of harsh misfortune, perhaps he
thought more of the Marianne that he had los