"What is the matter?" I said to her in a low voice.

She pressed my hand without a word, for tears still veiled her voice.

But after a few minutes, recovering herself a little, she said to me:

"You have been very unkind to me, Armand, and I have done nothing to you."

"Nothing?" I answered, with a bitter smile.

"Nothing but what circ.u.mstances forced me to do."

I do not know if you have ever in your life experienced, or if you will ever experience, what I felt at the sight of Marguerite.

The last time she had come to see me she had sat in the same place where she was now sitting; only, since then, she had been the mistress of another man, other kisses than mine had touched her lips, toward which, in spite of myself, my own reached out, and yet I felt that I loved this woman as much, more perhaps, than I had ever loved her.

It was difficult for me to begin the conversation on the subject which brought her. Marguerite no doubt realized it, for she went on:

"I have come to trouble you, Armand, for I have two things to ask: pardon for what I said yesterday to Mlle. Olympe, and pity for what you are perhaps still ready to do to me. Intentionally or not, since your return you have given me so much pain that I should be incapable now of enduring a fourth part of what I have endured till now. You will have pity on me, won't you? And you will understand that a man who is not heartless has other n.o.bler things to do than to take his revenge upon a sick and sad woman like me. See, take my hand. I am in a fever. I left my bed to come to you, and ask, not for your friendship, but for your indifference."

I took Marguerite's hand. It was burning, and the poor woman shivered under her fur cloak.

I rolled the arm-chair in which she was sitting up to the fire.

"Do you think, then, that I did not suffer," said I, "on that night when, after waiting for you in the country, I came to look for you in Paris, and found nothing but the letter which nearly drove me mad? How could you have deceived me, Marguerite, when I loved you so much?

"Do not speak of that, Armand; I did not come to speak of that. I wanted to see you only not an enemy, and I wanted to take your hand once more.

You have a mistress; she is young, pretty, you love her they say. Be happy with her and forget me."

"And you. You are happy, no doubt?"

"Have I the face of a happy woman, Armand? Do not mock my sorrow, you, who know better than any one what its cause and its depth are."

"It only depended on you not to have been unhappy at all, if you are as you say."

"No, my friend; circ.u.mstances were stronger than my will. I obeyed, not the instincts of a light woman, as you seem to say, but a serious necessity, and reasons which you will know one day, and which will make you forgive me."

"Why do you not tell me those reasons to-day?"

"Because they would not bring about an impossible reunion between us, and they would separate you perhaps from those from whom you must not be separated."

"Who do you mean?"

"I can not tell you."

"Then you are lying to me."

Marguerite rose and went toward the door. I could not behold this silent and expressive sorrow without being touched, when I compared in my mind this pale and weeping woman with the madcap who had made fun of me at the Opera Comique.

"You shall not go," I said, putting myself in front of the door.

"Why?"

"Because, in spite of what you have done to me, I love you always, and I want you to stay here."

"To turn me out to-morrow? No; it is impossible. Our destinies are separate; do not try to reunite them. You will despise me perhaps, while now you can only hate me."

"No, Marguerite," I cried, feeling all my love and all my desire reawaken at the contact of this woman. "No, I will forget everything, and we will be happy as we promised one another that we would be."

Marguerite shook her head doubtfully, and said:

"Am I not your slave, your dog? Do with me what you will. Take me; I am yours."

And throwing off her cloak and hat, she flung them on the sofa, and began hurriedly to undo the front of her dress, for, by one of those reactions so frequent in her malady, the blood rushed to her head and stifled her. A hard, dry cough followed.

"Tell my coachman," she said, "to go back with the carriage."

I went down myself and sent him away. When I returned Marguerite was lying in front of the fire, and her teeth chattered with the cold.

I took her in my arms. I undressed her, without her making a movement, and carried her, icy cold, to the bed. Then I sat beside her and tried to warm her with my caresses. She did not speak a word, but smiled at me.

It was a strange night. All Marguerite's life seemed to have pa.s.sed into the kisses with which she covered me, and I loved her so much that in my transports of feverish love I asked myself whether I should not kill her, so that she might never belong to another.

A month of love like that, and there would have remained only the corpse of heart or body.

The dawn found us both awake. Marguerite was livid white. She did not speak a word. From time to time, big tears rolled from her eyes, and stayed upon her cheeks, shining like diamonds. Her thin arms opened, from time to time, to hold me fast, and fell back helplessly upon the bed.

For a moment it seemed to me as if I could forget all that had pa.s.sed since I had left Bougival, and I said to Marguerite:

"Shall we go away and leave Paris?"

"No, no!" she said, almost with affright; "we should be too unhappy. I can do no more to make you happy, but while there is a breath of life in me, I will be the slave of your fancies. At whatever hour of the day or night you will, come, and I will be yours; but do not link your future any more with mine, you would be too unhappy and you would make me too unhappy. I shall still be pretty for a while; make the most of it, but ask nothing more."

When she had gone, I was frightened at the solitude in which she left me. Two hours afterward I was still sitting on the side of the bed, looking at the pillow which kept the imprint of her form, and asking myself what was to become of me, between my love and my jealousy.

At five o'clock, without knowing what I was going to do, I went to the Rue d'Antin.

Nanine opened to me.

"Madame can not receive you," she said in an embarra.s.sed way.

"Why?"

"Because M. le Comte de N. is there, and he has given orders to let no one in."

"Quite so," I stammered; "I forgot."

I went home like a drunken man, and do you know what I did during the moment of jealous delirium which was long enough for the shameful thing I was going to do? I said to myself that the woman was laughing at me; I saw her alone with the count, saying over to him the same words that she had said to me in the night, and taking a five-hundred-franc note I sent it to her with these words:

"You went away so suddenly that I forgot to pay you. Here is the price of your night."