eir lips met.

"And above all, don't think about Canon Docre," she said, turning and
shaking her finger at him threateningly as she went out.

"Devil take you and your reticence," he said to himself, closing the
door after her.

CHAPTER XVI

"When I think," said Durtal to himself the next morning, "that in bed,
at the moment when the most pertinacious will succumbs, I held firm and
refused to yield to the instances of Hyacinthe wishing to establish a
footing here, and that after the carnal decline, at that instant when
annihilated man recovers--alas!--his reason, I supplicated her, myself,
to continue her visits, why, I simply cannot understand myself. Deep
down, I have not got over my firm resolution of breaking with her, but I
could not dismiss her like a cocotte. And," to justify his
inconsistency, "I hoped to get some information about the canon. Oh, on
that subject I am not through with her. She's got to make up her mind to
speak out and quit answering me by monosyllables and guarded phrases as
she did yesterday.

"Indeed, what can she have been up to with that abbe who was her
confessor and who, by her own admission, launched her into incubacy? She
has been his mistress, that is certain. And how many other of these
priests she has gone around with have been her lovers also? For she
confessed, in a cry, that those are the men she loves. Ah, if one went
about much in the clerical world one would doubtless learn remarkable
things concerning her and her husband. It is strange, all the same that
Chantelouve, who plays a singular role in that household, has acquired a
deplorable reputation, and she hasn't. Never have I heard anybody speak
of her dodges--but, oh, what a fool I am! It isn't strange. Her husband
doesn't confine himself to religious and polite circles. He hobnobs with
men of letters, and in consequence exposes himself to every sort of
slander, while she, if she takes a lover, chooses him out of a pious
society in which not one of us would ever be received. And then, abbes
are discreet. But how explain her infatuation with me? By the simple
fact that she is surfeited of priests and a layman serves as a change of
diet.

"Just the same, she is quite singular, and the more I see her the less I
understand her. There are in her three distinct beings.

"First the woman seated or standing up, whom I knew in her drawing-room,
reserved, almost haughty, who becomes a good companion in private,
affecti