f the night to come. From time to time my
heart leaped with love and joy in my breast. A sweet fever thrilled
me. I thought no more of the reasons which had filled my mind before I
slept. I saw only the result, I thought only of the hour when I was to
see Marguerite again.

It was impossible to stay indoors. My room seemed too small to contain
my happiness. I needed the whole of nature to unbosom myself.

I went out. Passing by the Rue d'Antin, I saw Marguerite's coupe'
waiting for her at the door. I went toward the Champs-Elysees. I loved
all the people whom I met. Love gives one a kind of goodness.

After I had been walking for an hour from the Marly horses to the
Rond-Point, I saw Marguerite's carriage in the distance; I divined
rather than recognised it. As it was turning the corner of the
Champs-Elysees it stopped, and a tall young man left a group of people
with whom he was talking and came up to her. They talked for a few
moments; the young man returned to his friends, the horses set out
again, and as I came near the group I recognised the one who had spoken
to Marguerite as the Comte de G., whose portrait I had seen and whom
Prudence had indicated to me as the man to whom Marguerite owed her
position. It was to him that she had closed her doors the night before;
I imagined that she had stopped her carriage in order to explain to him
why she had done so, and I hoped that at the same time she had found
some new pretext for not receiving him on the following night.

How I spent the rest of the day I do not know; I walked, smoked, talked,
but what I said, whom I met, I had utterly forgotten by ten o'clock in
the evening.

All I remember is that when I returned home, I spent three hours over
my toilet, and I looked at my watch and my clock a hundred times, which
unfortunately both pointed to the same hour.

When it struck half past ten, I said to myself that it was time to go.

I lived at that time in the Rue de Provence; I followed the Rue du
Mont-Blanc, crossed the Boulevard, went up the Rue Louis-le-Grand, the
Rue de Port-Mahon, and the Rue d'Antin. I looked up at Marguerite's
windows. There was a light. I rang. I asked the porter if Mlle. Gautier
was at home. He replied that she never came in before eleven or a
quarter past eleven. I looked at my watch. I intended to come quite
slowly, and I had come in five minutes from the Rue de Provence to the
Rue d'Antin.

I walked to and fro in the street; there ar