n he has about Canon Docre!"

She stood motionless, but her eyes clouded over. She did not answer.

"True," he said, "Chantelouve, suspecting our liaison--"

She interrupted him. "My husband has no concern with the relations which
may exist between you and me. He evidently suffers when I go out, as
tonight, for he knows where I am going; but I admit no right of control
either on his part or mine. He is free, and I am free, to go wherever we
please. I must keep house for him, watch out for his interests, take
care of him, love him like a devoted companion, and that I do, with all
my heart. As to being responsible for my acts, they're none of his
business, no more his than anybody else's."

She spoke in a crisp, incisive tone.

"The devil;" said Durtal. "You certainly reduce the importance of the
role of husband."

"I know that my ideas are not the ideas of the world I live in, and they
appear not to be yours. In my first marriage they were a source of
trouble and disaster--but I have an iron will and I bend the people who
love me. In addition, I despise deceit, so when a few years after
marriage I became smitten on a man I quite frankly told my husband and
confessed my fault."

"Dare I ask you in what spirit he received this confidence?"

"He was so grieved that in one night his hair turned white. He could not
bear what he called--wrongly, I think--my treason, and he killed
himself."

"Ah!" said Durtal, dumbfounded by the placid and resolute air of this
woman, "but suppose he had strangled you first?"

She shrugged her shoulders and picked a cat hair off her skirt.

"The result," he resumed after a silence, "being that you are now almost
free, that your second husband tolerates--"

"Let us not discuss my second husband. He is an excellent man who
deserves a better wife. I have absolutely no reason to speak of
Chantelouve otherwise than with praise, and then--oh, let's talk of
something else, for I have had sufficient botheration on this subject
from my confessor, who interdicts me from the Holy Table."

He contemplated her, and saw yet another Hyacinthe, a hard, pertinacious
woman whom he had not known. Not a sign nor an accent of emotion,
nothing, while she was describing the suicide of her first husband--she
did not even seem to imagine that she had a crime on her conscience. She
remained pitiless, and yet, a moment ago, when she was commiserating him
because of his fictitious parenthood, he had thought