sign the wretched picture to the barn, if you like. We will
never say another word about so foolish a matter. You promise me to
forget it, won't you?... Dear! you will promise me?" he added, after a
pause.

Madame de Nailles sighed and replied: "If not she it will be some one
else. I am very unhappy.... I am weak and contemptible...."

"Clotilde!" replied Marien, in an accent that went to Jacqueline's heart
like a knife.

She fancied that after this she heard the sound of a kiss, and, with
her cheeks aflame and her head burning, she rushed away. She understood
little of what she had overheard. She only realized that he had
given her up, that he had turned her into ridicule, that he had said
"Clotilde!" to her mother, that he had called her dear--she!--the woman
she had so adored, so venerated, her best friend, her father's wife,
her mother by adoption! Everything in this world seemed to be giving
way under her feet. The world was full of falsehood and of treason, and
life, so bad, so cruel, was no longer what she had supposed it to be. It
had broken its promise to herself, it had made her bad--bad forever. She
loved no one, she believed in no one. She wished she were dead.

How she reached her own room in this state Jacqueline never knew. She
was aware at last of being on her knees beside her bed, with her face
hidden in the bed-clothes. She was biting them to stifle her desire to
scream. Her hands were clenched convulsively.

"Mamma!" she cried, "mamma!"

Was this a reproach addressed to her she had so long called by that
name? Or was it an appeal, vibrating with remorse, to her real mother,
so long forgotten in favor of this false idol, her rival, her enemy?

Undoubtedly, Jacqueline was too innocent, too ignorant to guess the real
truth from what she had overheard. But she had learned enough to be no
longer the pure-minded young girl of a few hours before. It seemed to
her as if a fetid swamp now lay before her, barring her entrance into
life. Vague as her perceptions were, this swamp before her seemed more
deep, more dark, more dreadful from uncertainty, and Jacqueline felt
that thenceforward she could make no step in life without risk
of falling into it. To whom now could she open her heart in
confidence--that heart bleeding and bruised as if it had been trampled
one as if some one had crushed it? The thing that she now knew was
not like her own little personal secrets, such as she had imprudently
confided t