g
back to have a nap."

Madame de Cadour turned to her old friend and said:

"Will you come with me, Monsieur d'Apreval?"

He bowed with a smile, and with all the gallantry of by-gone years:

"I will go wherever you go," he replied.

"Very well, then, go and get a sunstroke," Monsieur de Cadour said; and
he went back to the _Hotel des Bains_, to lie down on his bed for an
hour or two.

As soon as they were alone, the old lady and her old companion set off,
and she said to him in a low voice, squeezing his hand:

"At last! at last!"

"You are mad," he said in a whisper. "I assure you that you are mad.
Think of the risk you are running. If that man ..."

She started.

"Oh! Henri, do not say _that man_, when you are speaking of him."

"Very well," he said abruptly, "if our son guesses anything, if he has
any suspicions, he will have you, he will have us both in his power. You
have got on without seeing him for the last forty years; what is the
matter with you to-day?"

They had been going up the long street that leads from the sea to the
town, and now they turned to the right, to go to Etretat. The white road
extended in front of them, under a blaze of brilliant sunshine, so they
went on slowly in the burning heat. She had taken her old friend's arm,
and was looking straight in front of her, with a fixed and haunted gaze,
and at last she said:

"And so you have not seen him again, either?"

"No, never."

"Is it possible?"

"My dear friend, do not let us begin that discussion again. I have a
wife and children and you have a husband, so we both of us have much to
fear from other people's opinion."

She did not reply; she was thinking of her long-past youth, and of many
sad things that had occurred. She had been married as girls are married;
she hardly knew her betrothed, who was a diplomatist, and later, she
lived the same life with him that all women of the world live with their
husbands. But Monsieur d'Apreval, who was also married, loved her with a
profound passion, and while Monsieur de Cadour was absent in India, on a
political mission for a long time, she succumbed. Could she possibly
have resisted, have refused to give herself? Could she have had the
strength and courage not to have yielded, as she loved him also? No,
certainly not; it would have been too hard; she would have suffered too
much! How cruel and deceitful life is! Is it possible to avoid certain
attacks of fate, or can one escape fr