Jacqueline. It enabled her to recover in quiet from the
effects of a bitter deception.

Madame de Nailles was not sufficiently uneasy about her to be always at
her bedside. Usually the sick girl stayed alone, with her window-curtains
closed, lying there in the soft half-light that was soothing to her
nerves. The silence was broken at intervals by the voice of Modeste, who
would come and offer her her medicine. When Jacqueline had taken it, she
would shut her eyes, and resume, half asleep, her sad reflections. These
were always the same. What could be the tie between her stepmother and
Marien?

She tried to recall all the proofs of friendship she had seen pass
between them, but all had taken place openly. Nothing that she could
remember seemed suspicious. So she thought at first, but as she thought
more, lying, feverish, upon her bed, several things, little noticed at
the time, were recalled to her remembrance. They might mean nothing, or
they might mean much. In the latter case, Jacqueline could not understand
them very well. But she knew he had called her "Clotilde," that he had
even dared to say "thou" to her in private--these were things she knew of
her own knowledge. Her pulse beat quicker as she thought of them; her
head burned. In that studio, where she had passed so many happy hours,
had Marien and her stepmother ever met as lovers?

Her stepmother and Marien! She could not understand what it meant. Must
she apply to them a dreadful word that she had picked up in the history
books, where it had been associated with such women as Margaret of
Burgundy, Isabeau of Bavaria, Anne Boleyn, and other princesses of very
evil reputation? She had looked it out in the dictionary, where the
meaning given was: "To be unfaithful to conjugal vows." Even then she
could not understand precisely the meaning of adultery, and she set
herself to solve it during the long lonely days when she was
convalescent. When she was able to walk from one room to another, she
wandered in a loose dressing-gown, whose long, lank folds showed that she
had grown taller and thinner during her illness, into the room that held
the books, and went boldly up to the bookcase, the key of which had been
left in the lock, for everybody had entire confidence in Jacqueline's
scrupulous honesty. Never before had she broken a promise; she knew that
a well-brought-up young girl ought to read only such books as were put
into her hands. The idea of taking a volume