drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication
and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna
seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that
charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had
loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit
night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with
cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of
the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they
uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the
vibrations of the last chords.

"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?"

"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"

"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on
before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with
her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the
ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?"

Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began
in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master
Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie,
thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that
he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered
very much with the words.

"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!"

"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like
to understand things."

"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently.

Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms
in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed
of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the
little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like
this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous,
without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if
in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the
disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some
great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty
blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that
happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire.
She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So,
strivi