These charming gardens, the starry night, the cool air, laden
with incense from our wealth of flowers, our valley, our hills--all
seemed to me gloomy, black, and desolate. It was as though I lay at the
foot of a precipice, surrounded by serpents and poisonous plants, and
saw no God in the sky. Such a night ages a woman.

Next morning I said:

"Take Fedelta and be off to Paris! Don't sell her; I love her. Does she
not carry you?"

But he was not deceived; my tone betrayed the storm of feeling which I
strove to conceal.

"Trust me!" he replied; and the gesture with which he held out his hand,
the glance of his eye, were so full of loyalty that I was overcome.

"What petty creatures women are!" I exclaimed.

"No, you love me, that is all," he said, pressing me to his heart.

"Go to Paris without me," I said, and this time I made him understand
that my suspicions were laid aside.

He went; I thought he would have stayed. I won't attempt to tell you
what I suffered. I found a second self within, quite strange to me. A
crisis like this has, for the woman who loves, a tragic solemnity that
baffles words; the whole of life rises before you then, and you search
in vain for any horizon to it; the veriest trifle is big with meaning, a
glance contains a volume, icicles drift on uttered words, and the death
sentence is read in a movement of the lips.

I thought he would have paid me back in kind; had I not been
magnanimous? I climbed to the top of the chalet, and my eyes followed
him on the road. Ah! my dear Renee, he vanished from my sight with an
appalling swiftness.

"How keen he is to go!" was the thought that sprang of itself.

Once more alone, I fell back into the hell of possibilities, the
maelstrom of mistrust. There were moments when I would have welcomed
any certainty, even the worst, as a relief from the torture of suspense.
Suspense is a duel carried on in the heart, and we give no quarter to
ourselves.

I paced up and down the walks. I returned to the house, only to tear
out again, like a mad woman. Gaston, who left at seven o'clock, did not
return till eleven. Now, as it only takes half an hour to reach Paris
through the park of St. Cloud and the Bois de Boulogne, it is plain that
he must have spent three hours in town. He came back radiant, with a
whip in his hand for me, an india-rubber whip with a gold handle.

For a fortnight I had been without a whip, my old one being worn and
broken.

"Was it fo