d his hatred, and
his wounded vanity, were drowned in his love and its despair, and then
he bowed his head, and sobbed and cried as if his heart would burst. One
morning he was so sobbing with his head on the table, when his landlady
tapped at his door. He started up and turned his head away from the
door.

"A young woman from Beaurepaire, monsieur."

"From Beaurepaire?" his heart gave a furious leap. "Show her in."

He wiped his eyes and seated himself at a table, and, all in a flutter,
pretended to be the state's.

It was not Jacintha, as he expected, but the other servant. She made a
low reverence, cast a look of admiration on him, and gave him a letter.
His eye darted on it: his hand trembled as he took it. He turned away
again to open it. He forced himself to say, in a tolerably calm voice,
"I will send an answer."

The letter was apparently from the baroness de Beaurepaire; a mere line
inviting him to pay her a visit. It was written in a tremulous hand.
Edouard examined the writing, and saw directly it was written by Rose.

Being now, naturally enough, full of suspicion, he set this down as an
attempt to disguise her hand. "So," said he, to himself, "this is the
game. The old woman is to be drawn into it, too. She is to help to make
Georges Dandin of me. I will go. I will baffle them all. I will expose
this nest of depravity, all ceremony on the surface, and voluptuousness
and treachery below. O God! who could believe that creature never loved
me! They shall none of them see my weakness. Their benefactor shall
be still their superior. They shall see me cold as ice, and bitter as
gall."

But to follow him farther just now, would be to run too far in advance
of the main story. I must, therefore, return to Beaurepaire, and show,
amongst other things, how this very letter came to be written.

When Josephine and Rose awoke from that startled slumber that followed
the exhaustion of that troubled night, Rose was the more wretched of the
two. She had not only dishonored herself, but stabbed the man she loved.

Josephine, on the other hand, was exhausted, but calm. The fearful
escape she had had softened down by contrast her more distant terrors.

She began to shut her eyes again, and let herself drift. Above all, the
doctor's promise comforted her: that she should go to Paris with him,
and have her boy.

This deceitful calm of the heart lasted three days.

Carefully encouraged by Rose, it was destroyed by