e. Do not think that you can take yourself back. I love you and I shall
keep you. So you thought you could get out of it very quietly? Listen a
moment. You have done everything to make me love you, to attach me to
you, to make it impossible for me to live without you.

"Six weeks ago you asked for nothing better. You were everything for me,
I was everything for you. And now you desire suddenly that I should know
you no longer; that you should be to me a stranger, a lady whom one meets
in society. Ah, you have a fine audacity! Have I dreamed? All the past is
a dream? I invented it all? Oh, there can be no doubt of it. You loved
me. I feel it still. Well, I have not changed. I am what I was; you have
nothing to complain of. I have not betrayed you for other women. It isn't
credit that I claim. I could not have done it. When one has known you,
one finds the prettiest women insipid. I never have had the idea of
deceiving you. I have always acted well toward you. Why should you not
love me? Answer! Speak! Say you love me still. Say it, since it is true.
Come, Therese, you will feel at once that you love as you loved me
formerly in the little nest where we were so happy. Come!"

He approached her ardently. She, her eyes full of fright, pushed him away
with a kind of horror.

He understood, stopped, and said:

"You have a lover."

She bent her head, then lifted it, grave and dumb.

Then he made a gesture as if to strike her, and at once recoiled in
shame. He lowered his eyes and was silent. His fingers to his lips, and
biting his nails, he saw that his hand had been pricked by a pin on her
waist, and bled. He threw himself in an armchair, drew his handkerchief
to wipe off the blood, and remained indifferent and without thought.

She, with her back to the door, her face calm and pale, her look vague,
arranged her hat with instinctive care. At the noise, formerly delicious,
that the rustle of her skirts made, he started, looked at her, and asked
furiously:

"Who is he? I will know."

She did not move. She replied with soft firmness:

"I have told you all I can. Do not ask more; it would be useless."

He looked at her with a cruel expression which she had never seen before.

"Oh, do not tell me his name. It will not be difficult for me to find
it."

She said not a word, saddened for him, anxious for another, full of
anguish and fear, and yet without regret, without bitterness, because her
real soul was elsewhere.