anne and Serge met every day at the little house in the Avenue
Maillot. Cayrol was too much engaged with the new anxieties which Herzog
caused him, to look after his wife, and left her quite free to amuse
herself. Besides, he had not the least suspicion. Jeanne, like all
guilty women, overwhelmed him with kind attentions, which the good man
mistook for proofs of love. The fatal passion was growing daily stronger
in the young woman's heart, and she would have found it impossible to
have given up her dishonorable happiness with Panine. She felt herself
capable of doing anything to preserve her lover.

Jeanne had already said, "Oh! if we were but free!" And they formed
projects. They would go away to Lake Lugano, and, in a villa hidden
by trees and shrubs, would enjoy the pleasures of being indissolubly
united. The woman was more eager than the man in giving way to these
visions of happiness. She sometimes said, "What hinders us now? Let
us go." But Serge, prudent and discreet, even in the most affectionate
moments, led Jeanne to take a more sensible view. What was the use of a
scandal? Did they not belong to each other?

Then the young woman reproached him for not loving her as much as she
loved him. She was tired of dissimulating; her husband was an object
of horror to her, and she had to tell him untruths and submit to his
caresses which were revolting to her. Serge calmed her with a kiss, and
bade her wait awhile.

Pierre, rendered anxious on hearing that Serge had joined Herzog in
his dangerous financial speculations, had left his mines and had just
arrived. The letters which Micheline addressed to the friend of her
youth, her enforced confidant in trouble, were calm and resigned.
Full of pride, she had carefully hidden from Pierre the cause of her
troubles. He was the last person by whom she would like to be pitied,
and her letters had represented Serge as repentant and full of good
feeling. Marechal, for similar reasons, had kept his friend in the
dark. He feared Pierre's interference, and he wished to spare Madame
Desvarennes the grief of seeing her adopted son quarreling with her
son-in-law.

But the placards announcing the establishment of the Universal Credit
Company made their way into the provinces, and one morning Pierre found
some stuck on the walls of his establishment. Seeing the name of Panine,
and not that of Cayrol, Pierre shuddered. The unpleasant ideas which
he experienced formerly when Herzog was