him the good news
of his wife's death?'

'As long as a woman is light enough to float, Hortense, she is not
counted drowned. It's only when she sinks out of sight that they give
her up.'

Hortense was silent a moment, looking at the sea with swollen eyes.

'Louis,' she said at last, 'we were speaking metaphorically: I have half
a mind to drown myself literally.'

'Nonsense!' replied Louis; 'an accused pleads 'not guilty,' and hangs
himself in prison. What do the papers say? People talk, do they? Can't
you talk as well as they? A woman is in the wrong from the moment she
holds her tongue and refuses battle. And that you do too often. That
pocket handkerchief is always more or less of a flag of truce.'

'I'm sure I don't know,' said Hortense indifferently; 'perhaps it is.'

There are moments of grief in which certain aspects of the subject of
our distress seems as irrelevant as matters entirely foreign to it. Her
eyes were still fastened on the sea. There was another silence. 'O my
poor Charles!' she murmured, at length, 'to what a hearth do you
return!'

'Hortense,' said the gentleman, as if he had not heard her, although, to
a third person, it would have appeared that it was because he had done
so that he spoke: 'I do not need to tell you that it will never happen
to me to betray our secret. But I will answer for it that so long as M.
Bernier is at home no mortal shall breathe a syllable of it.'

'What of that?' sighed Hortense. 'He will not be with me ten minutes
without guessing it.'

'Oh, as for that,' said her companion, dryly, 'that's your own affair.'

'Monsieur de Meyrau!' cried the lady.

'It seems to me,' continued the other, 'that in making such a guarantee,
I have done my part of the business.'

'Your part of the business!' sobbed Hortense.

M. de Meyrau made no reply, but with a great cut of the whip sent the
horse bounding along the road. Nothing more was said. Hortense lay back
in the carriage with her face buried in her handkerchief, moaning. Her
companion sat upright, with contracted brows and firmly set teeth,
looking straight before him, and by an occasional heavy lash keeping the
horse at a furious pace. A wayfarer might have taken him for a ravisher
escaping with a victim worn out with resistance. Travellers to whom they
were known would perhaps have seen a deep meaning in this accidental
analogy. So, by a _detour_, they returned to the town.

When Hortense reached home, she went str