, even though he could still feel her corpse-like weight
across his legs. And yet, he thought, she might perhaps have recovered.
At times he received quite a shock while he was walking through the
streets, on fancying that he recognised her; and he followed pink
bonnets and shawl-draped shoulders with a wildly beating heart. When he
closed his eyes he could see her walking, and advancing towards him;
but she let her shawl slip down, showing the two red stains on her
chemisette; and then he saw that her face was pale as wax, and that
her eyes were blank, and her lips distorted by pain. For a long time he
suffered from not knowing her name, from being forced to look upon her
as a mere shadow, whose recollection filled him with sorrow. Whenever
any idea of woman crossed his mind it was always she that rose up before
him, as the one pure, tender wife. He often found himself fancying that
she might be looking for him on that boulevard where she had fallen
dead, and that if she had met him a few seconds sooner she would have
given him a life of joy. And he wished for no other wife; none other
existed for him. When he spoke of her, his voice trembled to such a
degree that La Normande, her wits quickened by her love, guessed his
secret, and felt jealous.

"Oh, it's really much better that you shouldn't see her again," she said
maliciously. "She can't look particularly nice by this time."

Florent turned pale with horror at the vision which these words evoked.
His love was rotting in her grave. He could not forgive La Normande's
savage cruelty, which henceforth made him see the grinning jaws and
hollow eyes of a skeleton within that lovely pink bonnet. Whenever the
fish-girl tried to joke with him on the subject he turned quite angry,
and silenced her with almost coarse language.

That, however, which especially surprised the beautiful Norman in
these revelations was the discovery that she had been quite mistaken in
supposing that she was enticing a lover away from handsome Lisa. This
so diminished her feeling of triumph, that for a week or so her love
for Florent abated. She consoled herself, however, with the story of the
inheritance, no longer calling Lisa a strait-laced prude, but a thief
who kept back her brother-in-law's money, and assumed sanctimonious airs
to deceive people. Every evening, while Muche took his writing lesson,
the conversation turned upon old Gradelle's treasure.

"Did anyone ever hear of such an idea?