g home?'

"'Yes, of course I am.'

"I left her, and wandered about the streets by myself. What was going
on? While I was talking to her, I had an intuitive feeling of her
falseness, but now I could not believe that it was so, and when I
returned home to dinner, I was angry for having suspected her, even for
a moment.

"Have you ever been jealous? It does not matter whether you have or not,
but the first drop of jealousy had fallen into my heart, and that is
always like a spark of fire. It did not formulate anything, and I did
not think anything; I only knew that she had lied. You must remember
that every night, after the customers and clerks had left, we were
alone, and either strolled as far as the harbor, when it was fine, or
remained talking in my office, if the weather was bad, and I used to
open my heart to her without any reserve, because I loved her. She was
part of my life, the greater part, and all my happiness, and in her
small hands she held my trusting, faithful heart captive.

"During those first days, those days of doubt, and before my suspicions
increased and assumed a precise shape, I felt as depressed and chilly as
when we are going to be seriously ill. I was continually cold, really
cold, and could neither eat nor sleep. Why had she told me a lie? What
was she doing in that house? I went there, to try and find out
something, but I could discover nothing. The man who rented the first
floor, and who was an upholsterer, had told me all about his neighbors,
but without helping me the least. A midwife had lived on the second
floor, a dressmaker and a manicure and chiropodist on the third, and two
coachmen and their families in the attics.

"Why had she told me a lie? It would have been so easy for her to have
said that she had been to the dressmaker's or the chiropodist's. Oh! How
I longed to question them, also! I did not say so, for fear that she
might guess my suspicions. One thing, however, was certain; she had been
into that house, and had concealed the fact from me, so there was some
mystery in it. But what? At one moment, I thought there might be some
laudable purpose in it, some charitable deed that she wished to hide,
some information which she wished to obtain, and I found fault with
myself for suspecting her. Have not all of us the right of our little,
innocent secrets, a kind of second, interior life, for which one ought
not to be responsible to anybody? Can a man, because he has taken a gi