mpestuous atmosphere; and
when complaints escaped Frederick's lips, she made accusations against
herself.

"Yes, I am doing wrong. I am acting as if I were a coquette! Don't come
any more!"

Then he would repeat the same oaths, to which on each occasion she
listened with renewed pleasure.

His return to Paris, and the fuss occasioned by New Year's Day,
interrupted their meetings to some extent. When he returned, he had an
air of greater self-confidence. Every moment she went out to give
orders, and in spite of his entreaties she received every visitor that
called during the evening.

After this, they engaged in conversations about Leotade, M. Guizot, the
Pope, the insurrection at Palermo, and the banquet of the Twelfth
Arrondissement, which had caused some disquietude. Frederick eased his
mind by railing against Power, for he longed, like Deslauriers, to turn
the whole world upside down, so soured had he now become. Madame Arnoux,
on her side, had become sad.

Her husband, indulging in displays of wild folly, was flirting with one
of the girls in his pottery works, the one who was known as "the girl
from Bordeaux." Madame Arnoux was herself informed about it by
Frederick. He wanted to make use of it as an argument, "inasmuch as she
was the victim of deception."

"Oh! I'm not much concerned about it," she said.

This admission on her part seemed to him to strengthen the intimacy
between them. Would Arnoux be seized with mistrust with regard to them?

"No! not now!"

She told him that, one evening, he had left them talking together, and
had afterwards come back again and listened behind the door, and as they
both were chatting at the time of matters that were of no consequence,
he had lived since then in a state of complete security.

"With good reason, too--is that not so?" said Frederick bitterly.

"Yes, no doubt!"

It would have been better for him not to have given so risky an answer.

One day she was not at home at the hour when he usually called. To him
there seemed to be a sort of treason in this.

He was next displeased at seeing the flowers which he used to bring her
always placed in a glass of water.

"Where, then, would you like me to put them?"

"Oh! not there! However, they are not so cold there as they would be
near your heart!"

Not long afterwards he reproached her for having been at the Italian
opera the night before without having given him a previous intimation of
her intention to