she is really lying, how can I ever be sure?"

III

In the eighth year, Madeleine Conti retired from the stage and announced
her marriage. After five years of complete happiness she was taken
suddenly ill, as the result of exposure to a drenching storm. One
afternoon, as he waited by her bedside, talking in broken tones of all
that they had been to each other, he said to her in a voice that he
tried nervously to school to quietness:

"Madeleine, you know that our life together has been without the
slightest shadow from the first. You know we have proved to each other
how immense our love has been. In all these years I have grown in
maturity and understanding. I regret only one thing, and I have
regretted it bitterly, every day--that I once asked you, if--if ever for
a moment another man came into your life to hide it from me, to tell me
a lie. It was a great mistake. I have never ceased to regret it. Our
love has been so above all worldly things that there ought not to be the
slightest concealment between us. I release you from that promise. Tell
me now the truth. It will mean nothing to me. During the eight years
when we were separated there were--there must have been times, times of
loneliness, of weakness, when other men came into your life. Weren't
there?"

She turned and looked at him steadily, her large eyes seeming larger and
more brilliant from the heightened fever of her cheeks. Then she made a
little negative sign of her head, still looking at him.

"No, never."

"You don't understand, Madeleine," he said, dissatisfied, "or you are
still thinking of what I said to you there in Etretat. That was thirteen
years ago. Then I had just begun to love you, I feared for the future,
for everything. Now I have tested you, and I have never had a doubt. I
know the difference between the flesh and the spirit. I know your two
selves; I know how impossible it would have been otherwise. Now you can
tell me."

"There is nothing--to tell," she said slowly.

"I expected that you would have other men who loved you about you," he
said, feverishly. "I knew it would be so. I swear to you I expected it.
I know why you continue to deny it. It's for my sake, isn't it? I love
you for it. But, believe me, in such a moment there ought nothing to
stand between us. Madeleine, Madeleine, I beg you, tell me the truth."

She continued to gaze at him fixedly, without turning away her great
eyes, as forgetting himself, he rush