fallen half asleep on the leather bench.
It had been a moment of oblivion. The images of that painful night passed
before his eyes. He said: "I recalled the night of the Arno. You have
spoiled for me all the joy and beauty in the world." He asked her to
leave him alone. In his lassitude he had a great pity for himself. He
would have liked to sleep--not to die; he held death in horror--but to
sleep and never to wake again. Yet, before him, as desirable as formerly,
despite the painful fixity of her dry eyes, and more mysterious than
ever, he saw her. His hatred was vivified by suffering.

She extended her arms to him. "Listen to me, Jacques." He motioned to her
that it was useless for her to speak. Yet he wished to listen to her, and
already he was listening with avidity. He detested and rejected in
advance what she would say, but nothing else in the world interested him.

She said:

"You may have believed I was betraying you, that I was not living for you
alone. But can you not understand anything? You do not see that if that
man were my lover it would not have been necessary for him to talk to me
at the play-house in that box; he would have a thousand other ways of
meeting me. Oh, no, my friend, I assure you that since the day when I had
the happiness to meet you, I have been yours entirely. Could I have been
another's? What you imagine is monstrous. But I love you, I love you! I
love only you. I never have loved any one except you."

He replied slowly, with cruel heaviness:

"'I shall be every day, at three o'clock, at our home, in the Rue
Spontini.' It was not a lover, your lover, who said these things? No! it
was a stranger, an unknown person."

She straightened herself, and with painful gravity said:

"Yes, I had been his. You knew it. I have denied it, I have told an
untruth, not to irritate or grieve you. I saw you so anxious. But I lied
so little and so badly. You knew. Do not reproach me for it. You knew;
you often spoke to me of the past, and then one day somebody told you at
the restaurant--and you imagined much more than ever happened. While
telling an untruth, I was not deceiving you. If you knew the little that
he was in my life! There! I did not know you. I did not know you were to
come. I was lonely."

She fell on her knees.

"I was wrong. I should have waited for you. But if you knew how slight a
matter that was in my life!"

And with her voice modulated to a soft and singing complaint she sa