d her bed and left her. But, when he was in his own house
again, the idea suddenly struck him that, perhaps, Odette was expecting
some one else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired,
that she had asked him to put the light out only so that he should
suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left
the house she had lighted it again, and had reopened her door to the
stranger who was to be her guest for the night. He looked at his watch.
It was about an hour and a half since he had left her; he went out, took
a cab, and stopped it close to her house, in a little street running at
right angles to that other street, which lay at the back of her house,
and along which he used to go, sometimes, to tap upon her bedroom
window, for her to let him in. He left his cab; the streets were all
deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite
her house. Amid the glimmering blackness of all the row of windows, the
lights in which had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one,
from which overflowed, between the slats of its shutters, dosed like a
wine-press over its mysterious golden juice, the light that filled the
room within, a light which on so many evenings, as soon as he saw it,
far off, as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its
message: "She is there--expecting you," and now tortured him with: "She
is there with the man she was expecting." He must know who; he tiptoed
along by the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting
bars of the shutters he could see nothing; he could hear, only, in the
silence of the night, the murmur of conversation. What agony he suffered
as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere were moving, behind
the closed sash, the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that
murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his
own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at
that moment tasting with the stranger.

And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment which had forced
him to leave his own house had lost its sharpness when it lost its
uncertainty, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, at that
first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, almost
within his grasp, before his eyes, in the full glare of the lamp-light,
caught and kept there, an unwitting prisoner, in that room into which,
when he would, he might force