urn pale.

"Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend
responds to the grief of his friend. We understand each other. No, don't
add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause
trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen
together,--innocently enough, before a thousand people! There, you see I
am strong; adieu--"

She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman's rhetoric, an
antithesis of action.

"Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who
amuse me," she went on. "I live among artists, writers, in short the
world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille--who may indeed have acted
wisely. To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, 'I am
too old for him!' that is ending like the martyrs,--and the best end
too, if one cannot die a virgin."

She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had
made upon her former adorer.

"But," said Calyste, "where can I go to see you?"

"I am hidden in the rue de Chartres opposite the Parc de Monceaux, in
a little house suitable to my means; and there I cram my head with
literature--but only for myself, to distract my thoughts; God keep me
from the mania of literary women! Now go, leave me; I must not allow
the world to talk of me; what will it not say on seeing us together!
Adieu--oh! Calyste, my friend, if you stay another minute I shall burst
into tears!"

Calyste withdrew, after holding out his hand to Beatrix and feeling
for the second time that strange and deep sensation of a double
pressure--full of seductive tingling.

"Sabine never knew how to stir my soul in that way," was the thought
that assailed him in the corridor.

During the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not cast
three straight glances at Calyste, but there were many sidelong looks
which tore of the soul of the man now wholly thrown back into his first,
repulsed love.

When the baron du Guenic reached home the splendor of his apartments
made him think of the sort of mediocrity of which Beatrix had spoken,
and he hated his wealth because it could not belong to that fallen
angel. When he was told that Sabine had long been in bed he rejoiced to
find himself rich in the possession of a night in which to live over his
emotions. He cursed the power of divination which love had bestowed upon
Sabine. When by chance a man is adored by his wife, she reads