I would be capable of such
baseness?"

"You have no lover? No other man has touched you since you have been my
wife?"

"A lover? Some other man has touched me?" she repeated with that same
hypnotic look. In her child-like face there was the glow of
unadulterated honour and undiluted innocence.

"You have been having no secret _rendezvous_, you have not been
receiving treacherous letters, nor writing them, you have promised no
man anything, not even in jest?"

"Ah, well now, Daniel, listen! In jest. That's another matter. Who
knows? You know me, and you know how one talks and laughs."

"And you assure me that all this mysterious abuse that is being
whispered into my ears and to which your conduct has given a certain
amount of plausibility is nothing in the world but wickedness on the
part of people who know us, nothing but calumny?"

"Yes, Daniel: it is merely wickedness, meanness, and calumny."

"You are willing that God above should never grant you another minute of
peace, if you have been lying to me? Do you wish that, Dorothea?"

Dorothea balked; she blinked a little. Then she said quite softly:
"Those are terrible words, Daniel. But if you insist upon it, I am
willing to abide by the curse you have made a possibility."

Daniel breathed a breath of relief. He felt that a mighty load had been
taken from his heart. And in grateful emotion he went up to his wife,
and pressed her to his bosom.

But at the same time he was repelled by something. He felt that the
creature he was pressing to his heart was without rhythm, or vibration,
or law, or order. He began again to be gnawed at by torture, this time
of a new species and coming from another direction.

As he opened the door to the hall, he heard a rustle; and he saw a dark
figure hastening over to the room that opened on the court.

V

Left alone, Dorothea stared for a while into space, as motionless as a
statue. Then she took her violin and bow from the case--she had bought a
new bow to take the place of the one that had been broken--and began to
play: a cadence, a trill, a waltz. Her face took on a hardened, resolute
expression.

She soon let the instrument fall from her hands, and began to think. She
laid the violin to one side, took off her slippers, sneaked out of the
room in her stocking feet and across the hall, and listened at the door
to Philippina's room. She opened it cautiously and heard a sound snoring