ate or romantic about her feeling for Georges. He was like
a second husband to her, younger and, above all, richer than the other.
To complete the vulgarization of their liaison, she had summoned her
parents to Asnieres, lodged them in a little house in the country, and
made of that vain and wilfully blind father and that affectionate, still
bewildered mother a halo of respectability of which she felt the
necessity as she sank lower and lower.

Everything was shrewdly planned in that perverse little brain, which
reflected coolly upon vice; and it seemed to her as if she might continue
to live thus in peace, when Frantz Risler suddenly arrived.

Simply from seeing him enter the room, she had realized that her repose
was threatened, that an interview of the gravest importance was to take
place between them.

Her plan was formed on the instant. She must at once put it into
execution.

The summer-house that they entered contained one large, circular room
with four windows, each looking out upon a different landscape; it was
furnished for the purposes of summer siestas, for the hot hours when one
seeks shelter from the sunlight and the noises of the garden. A broad,
very low divan ran all around the wall. A small lacquered table, also
very low, stood in the middle of the room, covered with odd numbers of
society journals.

The hangings were new, and the Persian pattern-birds flying among bluish
reeds--produced the effect of a dream in summer, ethereal figures
floating before one's languid eyes. The lowered blinds, the matting on
the floor, the Virginia jasmine clinging to the trellis-work outside,
produced a refreshing coolness which was enhanced by the splashing in the
river near by, and the lapping of its wavelets on the shore.

Sidonie sat down as soon as she entered the room, pushing aside her long
white skirt, which sank like a mass of snow at the foot of the divan; and
with sparkling eyes and a smile playing about her lips, bending her
little head slightly, its saucy coquettishness heightened by the bow of
ribbon on the side, she waited.

Frantz, pale as death, remained standing, looking about the room. After a
moment he began:

"I congratulate you, Madame; you understand how to make yourself
comfortable."

And in the next breath, as if he were afraid that the conversation,
beginning at such a distance, would not arrive quickly enough at the
point to which he intended to lead it, he added brutally:

"To wh