e
habit of keeping late hours. When the minute details of her toilette for
the night were over, and she had confided her beautiful body to the snowy
sheets of her couch, some new novel or fashionable magazine helped her
wile away the time until sleep came to her. Christian left his room, like
a good country gentleman, at sunrise; he left it either for the chase--or
to oversee workmen, who were continually being employed upon some part of
his domain. Ordinarily, he returned only in time for dinner, and rarely
saw Clemence except between that time and supper, at the conclusion of
which, fatigued by his day's work, he hastened to seek the repose of the
just. Husband and wife, while living under the same roof, were thus
almost completely isolated from each other; night for one was day for the
other.

By the haste with which Clemence shortened her preparations for the
night, one would have said that she must have been blessed with an
unusually sleepy sensation. But when she lay in bed, with her head under
her arm, like a swan with his neck under his wing, and almost in the
attitude of Correggio's Magdalen, her eyes, which sparkled with a
feverish light, betrayed the fact that she had sought the solitude of her
bed in order to indulge more freely in deep meditation.

With marvelous fidelity she went over the slightest events of the day, to
which by a constant effort of willpower, she had seemed so indifferent.
First, she saw Gerfaut with his face covered with blood, and the thought
of the terrible sensation which this sight caused her made her heart
throb violently. She then recalled him as she next saw him, in the
drawing-room by her husband's side, seated in the very chair that she had
left but a moment before. This trifling circumstance impressed her; she
saw in this a proof of sympathetic understanding, a sort of gift of
second sight which Octave possessed, and which in her eyes was so
formidable a weapon. According to her ideas, he must have suspected that
this was her own favorite chair and have seized it for that reason, just
as he would have loved to take her in his arms.

For the first time, Clemence had seen together the man to whom she
belonged and the man whom she regarded somewhat as her property. For, by
one of those arrangements with their consciences of which women alone
possess the secret, she had managed to reason like this: "Since I am
certain always to belong to Monsieur de Bergenheim only, Octave can
c