ice remained there crushed but drawn by the noise of
the street, as if by some whirlpool in the deep sea. Had he been thrown
out and been dashed upon the pavements, he would have been happy. Only a
void seemed about him, and before him that black hollow in which moved
confusedly only strangers who in no way formed part of his life.

This isolation terrified him. At last, he went downstairs in haste,
threw himself into a carriage and had himself driven to the railway,
intending to see Adrienne again.

"Quickly! quickly! at your best speed!"

The driver whipped up his horses and the carriage-windows clattered with
the noise of old iron.

Vaudrey arrived too late. The train had left twenty minutes before. He
had reflected too long at his window.

"Besides," he said to himself sadly, "she would not have forgiven me!
She will never forget!"

Buried in the corner of the coach that took her away, and closing her
eyes, recalling all her past life, so cruelly ironical to-day, Adrienne,
disturbed by the noise and rolling of the train that increased her
feverish condition, felt her heart swell, and poor, broken creature
that she was, called all her strength to her aid to refrain from
weeping, from crying out in her grief. She was taking away, back to the
country, the half-withered Christmas roses received from Grenoble, and
in the morbid confusion of the ideas that clashed in her poor brain, she
saw once more Lissac's blanched face and heard Guy tell her again: "It
is because you are a virtuous woman that I love you!"

"A virtuous woman! Does he know how to love as well as the others?" she
murmured, as she thought of Vaudrey whom she would never see again, and
whom she no longer loved.

"See! I am a widow now, and a widow who will never love anyone, and who
will never marry again."

VIII

Alone in Paris now, a body without a soul, distracted, and the prey of
ennui, with sad and bitter regret for his wasted life, repeating to
himself that Adrienne, far away from him, would never forgive, and was
doubtless, at this moment, saying and saying again to herself in her
solitude at Grenoble, that these politicians, at least, owed her
divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled
rest, mechanically entered the Opera House to distract his eyes if not
his mind.

They were rendering _Aida_ that evening, and a debutante had been
announced as a star.

Sulpice Vaudrey, since Adrienne's departure,-