ot be made to suffer for it.'

"I made no speech of thanks. Thanks would have been superfluous between
us. This shade shows the character of our relations. And yet we had not
yet unlimited confidence in each other; he did not open to me the vast
subterranean chambers which I had detected in his secret life; and
I, for my part, never said to him, 'What ails you? From what are you
suffering?'

"What could he be doing during those long evenings? He would often come
in on foot or in a hackney cab when I returned in a carriage--I, his
secretary! Was so pious a man a prey to vices hidden under hypocrisy?
Did he expend all the powers of his mind to satisfy a jealousy more
dexterous than Othello's? Did he live with some woman unworthy of him?
One morning, on returning from I have forgotten what shop, where I had
just paid a bill, between the Church of Saint-Paul and the Hotel de
Ville, I came across Comte Octave in such eager conversation with an old
woman that he did not see me. The appearance of this hag filled me with
strange suspicions, suspicions that were all the better founded because
I never found that the Count invested his savings. Is it not shocking to
think of? I was constituting myself my patron's censor. At that time I
knew that he had more than six hundred thousand francs to invest; and
if he had bought securities of any kind, his confidence in me was so
complete in all that concerned his pecuniary interests, that I certainly
should have known it.

"Sometimes, in the morning, the Count took exercise in his garden, to
and fro, like a man to whom a walk is the hippogryph ridden by dreamy
melancholy. He walked and walked! And he rubbed his hands enough to
rub the skin off. And then, if I met him unexpectedly as he came to
the angle of a path, I saw his face beaming. His eyes, instead of
the hardness of a turquoise, had that velvety softness of the blue
periwinkle, which had so much struck me on the occasion of my first
visit, by reason of the astonishing contrast in the two different looks;
the look of a happy man, and the look of an unhappy man. Two or three
times at such a moment he had taken me by the arm and led me on; then
he had said, 'What have you come to ask?' instead of pouring out his
joy into my heart that opened to him. But more often, especially since
I could do his work for him and write his reports, the unhappy man would
sit for hours staring at the goldfish that swarmed in a handsome marble
basin