ctingly by Guy de Lissac.

She looked at him with a glance that reached his soul, not knowing what
she said:

"Leave now! While the ball is in progress. To leave solitude to him,
suddenly--here! And that woman, if he wishes her, and if the other who
is marrying her will yield her to him!"

She was carried away, her mind wandered, as if unbalanced by her grief,
all her efforts at self-control ending in a relaxation of her strained
nerves.

"I will leave!--I do not wish to see him again!"

"Leave to-night?"

"For Grenoble--I don't know where!--But to fly from him; ah! yes; to
escape from him! Take me away, Monsieur de Lissac!" she said
distractedly, as she seized his hand. "I should go mad here!"

She had unconsciously taken refuge, as it were, in the arms of the man
who loved her, and Lissac felt the exquisite grace of the body abandoned
to him, without the woman's reflecting upon it, without loving him,
lost--

It is quite certain that in her nervous, heart-broken condition,
Adrienne was not considering whether his affection for her sprung from
friendship or from love.

For a moment this master skeptic, Guy, felt that he was committing the
greatest folly of his life.

The young woman did not understand; nevertheless, even without love, he
clearly felt that this chasteness and grace, all that there was
exquisitely seductive about her, belonged to him--if he dared--

"You are feverish, Adrienne," he said, as he took her hands as he would
a child's.

"I am choking here!--I wish to leave!--take me away!"

"Nonsense," said Lissac. "What are you thinking about? They are calling
for you, yonder."

"It is because they call for me that I wish to escape. Don't you see
that I abhor all those people; that I detest them as much as I despise
them? Take me away!"

Lissac had become very pale. He tried to smile at Adrienne--the heroic
smile of a wounded man undergoing amputation--and he whispered:

"Don't you know very well, madame, that you would not have taken two
steps in the street, on my arm, before you would become a lost woman?"

"Well," she said, "what of that, since it is they who are loved!--"

"No, madame," Guy replied, "I love you. I may say so, because you are a
virtuous woman, and I have no right to take you away, do you understand?
because I love you."

He, too, had summoned all his strength to impart to his confession,
which he would have expressed with ardor, the cold tone of a phrase.

But t