lumined with pleasure, her eyes
bright with some gay or delicate thought, she assumed a grave and
serious aspect.

"What is the matter?" said Nathan.

"Why do you pretend to such ignorance?" she replied. "You ought to know
that a woman is not a child."

"Have I displeased you?"

"Should I be here if you had?"

"But you don't smile to me; you don't seem happy to see me."

"Oh! do you accuse me of sulking?" she said, looking at him with that
submissive air which women assume when they want to seem victims.

Nathan walked on a few steps in a state of real apprehension which
oppressed him.

"It must be," he said, after a moment's silence, "one of those frivolous
fears, those hazy suspicions which women dwell on more than they do
on the great things of life. You all have a way of tipping the world
sideways with a straw, a cobweb--"

"Sarcasm!" she said, "I might have expected it!"

"Marie, my angel, I only said those words to wring your secret out of
you."

"My secret would be always a secret, even if I told it to you."

"But all the same, tell it to me."

"I am not loved," she said, giving him one of those sly oblique glances
with which women question so maliciously the men they are trying to
torment.

"Not loved!" cried Nathan.

"No; you are too occupied with other things. What am I to you in the
midst of them? forgotten on the least occasion! Yesterday I came to the
Bois and you were not here--"

"But--"

"I had put on a new dress expressly to please you; you did not come;
where were you?"

"But--"

"I did not know where. I went to Madame d'Espard's; you were not there."

"But--"

"That evening at the Opera, I watched the balcony; every time a door
opened my heart was beating!"

"But--"

"What an evening I had! You don't reflect on such tempests of the
heart."

"But--"

"Life is shortened by such emotions."

"But--"

"Well, what?" she said.

"You are right; life is shortened by them," said Nathan, "and in a few
months you will utterly have consumed mine. Your unreasonable reproaches
drag my secret from me--Ha! you say you are not loved; you are loved too
well."

And thereupon he vividly depicted his position, told of his sleepless
nights, his duties at certain hours, the absolute necessity of
succeeding in his enterprise, the insatiable requirements of a newspaper
in which he was required to judge the events of the whole world without
blundering, under pain of losing his power,