ailing a few days before, he felt anxious about her,
remembering Madame Georges's strange agitation when she passed him so
hurriedly in the afternoon; and he retraced his steps as far as Pere
Achille's lodge to inquire.

The lodge was full. Coachmen were warming themselves around the stove,
chatting and laughing amid the smoke from their pipes. When Risler
appeared there was profound silence, a cunning, inquisitive, significant
silence. They had evidently been speaking of him.

"Is the Fromont child still sick?" he asked.

"No, not the child, Monsieur."

"Monsieur Georges sick?"

"Yes, he was taken when he came home to-night. I went right off to get
the doctor. He said that it wouldn't amount to anything--that all
Monsieur needed was rest."

As Risler closed the door Pere Achille added, under his breath, with the
half-fearful, half-audacious insolence of an inferior, who would like to
be listened to and yet not distinctly heard:

"Ah! 'dame', they're not making such a show on the first floor as they
are on the second."

This is what had happened.

Fromont jeune, on returning home during the evening, had found his wife
with such a changed, heartbroken face, that he at once divined a
catastrophe. But he had become so accustomed in the past two years to sin
with impunity that it did not for one moment occur to him that his wife
could have been informed of his conduct. Claire, for her part, to avoid
humiliating him, was generous enough to speak only of Savigny.

"Grandpapa refused," she said.

The miserable man turned frightfully pale.

"I am lost--I am lost!" he muttered two or three times in the wild
accents of fever; and his sleepless nights, a last terrible scene which
he had had with Sidonie, trying to induce her not to give this party on
the eve of his downfall, M. Gardinois' refusal, all these maddening
things which followed so closely on one another's heels and had agitated
him terribly, culminated in a genuine nervous attack. Claire took pity on
him, put him to bed, and established herself by his side; but her voice
had lost that affectionate intonation which soothes and persuades. There
was in her gestures, in the way in which she arranged the pillow under
the patient's head and prepared a quieting draught, a strange
indifference, listlessness.

"But I have ruined you!" Georges said from time to time, as if to rouse
her from that apathy which made him uncomfortable. She replied with a
proud, disda