happy, etc.

Sabine wrote across this letter these words, "Noble Brittany does not
always lie." She then laid the paper on Calyste's desk.

Calyste found the letter and read it. Seeing Sabine's sentence
and recognizing her handwriting he flung the letter into the fire,
determined to pretend that he had never received it. Sabine spent a
whole week in an agony the secrets of which are known only to angelic
or solitary souls whom the wing of the bad angel has never overshadowed.
Calyste's silence terrified her.

"I, who ought to be all gentleness, all pleasure to him, I have
displeased him, wounded him! My virtue has made itself hateful. I have
no doubt humiliated my idol," she said to herself. These thoughts
plowed furrows in her heart. She wanted to ask pardon for her fault,
but Certainty let loose upon her other proofs. Grown bold and insolent,
Beatrix wrote to Calyste at his own home; Madame du Guenic received the
letter, and gave it to her husband without opening it, but she said to
him, in a changed voice and with death in her soul: "My friend, that
letter is from the Jockey Club; I recognize both the paper and the
perfume."

Calyste colored, and put the letter into his pocket.

"Why don't you read it?"

"I know what it is about."

The young wife sat down. No longer did fever burn her, she wept no more;
but madness such as, in feeble beings, gives birth to miracles of crime,
madness which lays hands on arsenic for themselves or for their rivals,
possessed her. At this moment little Calyste was brought in, and she
took him in her arms to dance him. The child, just awakened, sought the
breast beneath the gown.

"He remembers,--he, at any rate," she said in a low voice.

Calyste went to his own room to read his letter. When he was no longer
present the poor young woman burst into tears, and wept as women weep
when they are all alone.

Pain, as well as pleasure, has its initiation. The first crisis, like
that in which poor Sabine nearly succumbed, returns no more than the
first fruits of other things return. It is the first wedge struck in the
torture of the heart; all others are expected, the shock to the nerves
is known, the capital of our forces has been already drawn upon for
vigorous resistance. So Sabine, sure of her betrayal, spent three
hours with her son in her arms beside the fire in a way that surprised
herself, when Gasselin, turned into a footman, came to say:--

"Madame is served."

"Let mo