re to say that!" she cried, drawing close to the little
table where the daggers rested amid the objects of art. "Don't be vile
enough to speak to me of a past of which nothing remains to me but
disgust! Let not one word which recalls it to me mount to your lips, not
one, you understand, or I will kill you like the coward you are!"

"Do so, Marsa!" he cried with wild, mad passion. "I should die by your
hand, and you would not marry that man!"

Afraid of herself, wresting her eyes from the glittering daggers, she
threw herself upon the divan, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, and
watched, with the look of a tigress, Michel, who said to her now, in a
voice which trembled with the tension of his feelings: "You must know
well, Marsa, that death is not the thing that can frighten a man like me!
What does frighten me is that, having lost you once, I may lose you
forever; to know that another will be your husband, will love you, will
receive your kisses. The very idea that that is possible drives me
insane. I feel myself capable of any deed of madness to prevent it.
Marsa! Marsa! You did love me once!"

"I love honor, truth, justice," said Marsa, sternly and implacably. "I
thought I loved you; but I never did."

"You did not love me?" he said.

This cruel recalling of the past, which was the remorse of her life, was
like touching her flesh with a red-hot iron.

"No, no, no! I did not love you! I repeat, I thought I loved you. What
did I know of life when I met you? I was suffering, ill; I thought myself
dying, and I never heard a word of pity fall from any other lips than
yours. I thought you were a man of honor. You were only a wretch. You
deceived me; you represented yourself to me as free--and you were
married. Weakly--oh, I could kill myself at the very thought!--I listened
to you! I took for love the trite phrases you had used to dozens of other
women; half by violence, half by ruse, you became my lover. I do not know
when--I do not know how. I try to forget that horrible dream; and when,
deluded by you, thinking that what I felt for you was love, for I did
think so, I imagined that I had given myself for life to a man worthy of
the deepest devotion, ready for all sacrifices for me, as I felt myself
to be for him; when you had taken me, body and soul, I learn by what? by
a trifling conversation, by a chance, in a crowded ballroom--that, this
Michel Menko, whose name I was to bear, who was to be my husband; this
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