d him in her arms, and held him tightly to her breast with
her head on his neck, faint with the weight of happiness, not for the
piece of furniture, but for the dispersion of her first dark doubt. It
was one of those magnificent transports which can be counted, and which
no love, however excessive, can prodigally spend, or life would be too
soon burned out. Then, indeed, men should fall at the feet of women to
adore them, for such moments are sublime, moments when the forces of the
heart and intellect gush forth like the waters of sculptured nymphs from
their inclining urns. Sabine burst into tears.

Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a
sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing heart
came near to killing her. As she held Calyste in her arms, her nose at
his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of that letter
paper! Another woman's head had lain there, whose hair and face had left
that adulterous odor! She had just kissed the spot where the kisses of
her rival were still warm.

"What is the matter?" asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back to
consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her smell
salts.

"Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both! Yes, my milk has turned, I feel
it. They won't come at once unless you fetch them yourself--go!"

Calyste, alarmed, rushed out. The moment Sabine heard the closing of the
porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked about the
salon as if beside herself, crying out, "My God! my God! my God!"

Those two words took the place of all ideas. The crisis she had seized
upon as a pretext in reality took place. The hairs of her head were
like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever. Her
boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try to
issue from all her pores. She was blind for a few moments, and cried
aloud, "I am dying!"

At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in.
After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the
first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend, Madame
de Portenduere. Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her brain
like straws at the will of a waterspout. "I saw," she said later,
"myriads all at once."

She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found
strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one mad
de