lifting a revolver.

'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' he shouted.

I sprang towards him, but it was too late.

PART III

THE VICTORY

I

When I came out of the house, hurried and angrily flushing, I perceived
clearly that my reluctance to break a habit and my desire for physical
comfort, if not my attachment to the girl, had led me too far. I was
conscious of humiliation. I despised myself. The fact was that I had
quarrelled with Yvonne--Yvonne, who had been with me for eight years,
Yvonne who had remained sturdily faithful during my long exile. Now the
woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with
a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or
both. Possibly I was both. I had permitted Yvonne too much liberty. I had
spoilt her. She was fidelity itself, goodness itself; but her character
had not borne the strain of realizing that she had acquired power over
me, and that she had become necessary to me. So that morning we had
differed violently; we had quarrelled as equals. The worst side of her
had appeared suddenly, shockingly. And she had left me, demonstrating
even as she banged the door that she was at least my mistress in
altercation. All day I fought against the temptation to eat my pride, and
ask her to return. It was a horrible, a deplorable, temptation. And
towards evening, after seven hours of solitude in the hotel in the Avenue
de Kleber, I yielded to it. I knew the address to which she had gone, and
I took a cab and drove there, hating myself. I was received with
excessive rudeness by a dirty and hag-like concierge, who, after refusing
all information for some minutes, informed me at length that the young
lady in question had quitted Paris in company with a gentleman.

The insolence of the concierge, my weakness and my failure, the bitter
sense of lost dignity, the fact that Yvonne had not hesitated even a few
hours before finally abandoning me--all these things wounded me. But the
sharpest stab of all was that during our stay in Paris Yvonne must have
had secret relations with a man. I had hidden nothing from her; she,
however, had not reciprocated my candour. I had imagined that she lived
only for me....

Well, the truth cannot be concealed that the years of wandering which had
succeeded the fatal night at Monte Carlo had done little to improve me.
What would you have? For months and months my ears rang with Frank's
despairing