n breast and
felt his lids fall softly to again. He remembered nothing; only
she was bending over him; and her breath had caressed his cheek.
Now she was bathing his temples, and he felt a delicious sense
of returning life. Monsieur Bargemont with the candle leant over
Jean Servien, who, opening his eyes for the second time, saw the
man's coarse red cheek within an inch of the actress's delicate
ear. He gave a great cry and a convulsive spasm shook his body.

"Perhaps it is an epileptic fit," said Monsieur Bargemont, coughing;
he was catching cold standing on the staircase.

She protested:

"We cannot leave a sick man without doing something for him. Go
and wake Rosalie."

He remounted the stairs, grumbling. Meantime Jean had got to his
feet and was standing with averted head.

She said to him in a low tone:

"So you love me still?"

He looked at her with an indescribable sadness:

"No, I don't love you any longer"--and he staggered down the stairs.

Monsieur Bargemont reappeared:

"It's very curious," he said, "but I can't make Rosalie hear."

The actress shrugged her shoulders.

"Look here, go away, will you? I have a horrid headache. Go away,
Bargemont."

XXX

She was Bargemont's mistress! The thought was torture to Jean
Servien, the more atrocious from the unexpectedness of the discovery.
He both hated and despised the coarse ruffian whose sham good-nature
did not impose on him, and whom he knew for a brutal, dull-witted,
mean-spirited bully. That pimply face, those goggle eyes, that
forehead with the swollen black vein running across it, that heavy
hand, that ugly, vulgar soul, could it be---- It sickened him to
think of it! And disgust was the thing of all others Servien's
delicately balanced nature felt most keenly. His morality was
shaky, and he could have found excuse for elegant vices, refined
perversions, romantic crimes. But Bargemont and his pot of butter!...
Never to possess the most adorable of women, never to see her more,
he was quite willing for the sacrifice still, but to know her in
the arms of that coarse brute staggered the mind and rendered
life impossible.

Absorbed in such thoughts, he found his way back instinctively
to his own quarter of the city. Shells whistled over his head
and burst with terrific reports. Flying figures passed him, their
heads enveloped in handkerchiefs and carrying mattresses on their
backs. At the corner of the _Rue de Rennes_ he tripped over