appointment in the isle of Becasses--you
know the little isle, close to the mill. I had to get there by swimming,
and he had to wait for me in a thicket, and then to remain there till
nightfall, so that nobody should see him going away. I had just met him
when the branches opened, and we saw Philippe, your orderly, who had
surprised us. I felt that we were lost, and I uttered a great cry.
Thereupon he said to me--he, my lover--'Go, swim back quietly, my
darling, and leave me here with this man.'

"I went away so excited that I was near drowning myself, and I came back
to you expecting that something dreadful was about to happen.

"An hour later, Philippe said to me in a low tone, in the lobby outside
the drawing-room where I met him: 'I am at madame's orders, if she has
any letters to give me.' Then I knew that he had sold himself, and that
my lover had bought him.

"I gave him some letters, in fact--all my letters--he took them away, and
brought me back the answers.

"This lasted about two months. We had confidence in him, as you had
confidence in him yourself.

"Now, father, here is what happened. One day, in the same isle which I
had to reach by swimming, but this time alone, I found your orderly. This
man had been waiting for me; and he informed me that he was going to
reveal everything about us to you, and deliver to you the letters which
he had kept, stolen, if I did not yield to his desires.

"Oh! father, father, I was filled with fear--a cowardly fear, an unworthy
fear, a fear above all of you who had been so good to me, and whom I had
deceived--fear on his account too--you would have killed him--for myself
also perhaps! I cannot tell; I was mad, desperate; I thought of once more
buying this wretch who loved me, too--how shameful!

"We are so weak, we women, we lose our heads more easily than you do. And
then, when a woman once falls, she always falls lower and lower. Did I
know what I was doing? I understood only that one of you two and I were
going to die--and I gave myself to this brute.

"You see, father, that I do not seek to excuse myself.

"Then, then--then what I should have foreseen happened--he had the better
of me again and again, when he wished, by terrifying me. He, too, has
been my lover, like the other, every day. Is not this abominable? And
what punishment, father?

"So then it is all over with me. I must die. While I lived, I could not
confess such a crime to you. Dead, I dare everyth