Bell, and he
added: 'Everybody knows about that.'

"So you loved him. You love him still! He is near you, doubtless. He goes
every year to the Dinard races. I have been told so. I see him. I see
everything. If you knew the images that worry me, you would say, 'He is
mad,' and you would take pity on me. Oh, how I should like to forget you
and everything! But I can not. You know very well I can not forget you
except with you. I see you incessantly with him. It is torture. I thought
I was unfortunate that night on the banks of the Arno. But I did not know
then what it is to suffer. To-day I know."

As she finished reading that letter, Therese thought: "A word thrown
haphazard has placed him in that condition, a word has made him
despairing and mad." She tried to think who might be the wretched fellow
who could have talked in that way. She suspected two or three young men
whom Le Menil had introduced to her once, warning her not to trust them.
And with one of the white and cold fits of anger she had inherited from
her father she said to herself: "I must know who he is." In the meanwhile
what was she to do? Her lover in despair, mad, ill, she could not run to
him, embrace him, and throw herself on him with such an abandonment that
he would feel how entirely she was his, and be forced to believe in her.
Should she write? How much better it would be to go to him, to fall upon
his heart and say to him: "Dare to believe I am not yours only!" But she
could only write. She had hardly begun her letter when she heard voices
and laughter in the garden. Therese went down, tranquil and smiling; her
large straw hat threw on her face a transparent shadow wherein her gray
eyes shone.

"How beautiful she is!" exclaimed Princess Seniavine. "What a pity it is
we never see her! In the morning she is promenading in the alleys of
Saint Malo, in the afternoon she is closeted in her room. She runs away
from us."

The coach turned around the large circle of the beach at the foot of the
villas and gardens on the hillside. And they saw at the left the ramparts
and the steeple of St. Malo rise from the blue sea. Then the coach went
into a road bordered by hedges, along which walked Dinard women, erect
under their wide headdresses.

"Unfortunately," said Madame Raymond, seated on the box by Montessuy's
side, "old costumes are dying out. The fault is with the railways."

"It is true," said Montessuy, "that if it were not for the railways the
pe