Constance did not stir.  For a moment she remained as if petrified, still listening, still waiting.  But only deep silence arose from the abyss.  She could merely hear the rain pelting on the glass roof with renewed rage.  And thereupon she fled, turned into the passage, re-entered her drawing-room.  There she collected and questioned herself.  Had she desired that abominable thing?  No, her will had had nought to do with it.  Most certainly it had been paralyzed, prevented from acting.  If it had been possible for the thing to occur, it had occurred quite apart from her, for assuredly she had been absent.  Absent, that word reassured her.  Yes, indeed, that was the case, she had been absent.  All her past life spread out behind her, faultless, pure of any evil action.  Never had she sinned, never until that day had any consciousness of guilt weighed upon her conscience.  An honest and virtuous woman, she had remained upright amidst all the excesses of her husband.  An impassioned mother, she had been ascending her calvary ever since her son’s death.  And this recollection of Maurice alone drew her for a moment from her callousness, choked her with a rising sob, as if in that direction lay her madness, the vainly sought explanation of the crime.  Vertigo again fell upon her, the thought of her dead son and of the other being master in his place, all her perverted passion for that only son of hers, the despoiled prince, all her poisoned, fermenting rage which had unhinged and maddened her, even to the point of murder.  Had that monstrous vegetation growing within her reached her brain then?  A rush of blood suffices at times to bedim a conscience.  But she obstinately clung to the view that she had been absent; she forced back her tears and remained frigid.  No remorse came to her.  It was done, and ’twas good that it should be done.  It was necessary.  She had not pushed him, he himself had fallen.  Had she not been there he would have fallen just the same.  And so since she had not been there, since both her brain and her heart had been absent, it did not concern her.  And ever and ever resounded the words which absolved her and chanted her victory; he was dead, and would never possess the works.

Erect in the middle of the drawing-room, Constance listened, straining her ears.  Why was it that she heard nothing?  How long they were in going down to pick him up!  Anxiously waiting for the tumult which she expected, the clamor of horror which would assuredly rise from the works, the heavy footsteps, the loud calls, she held her breath, quivering at the slightest, faintest sound.  Several minutes still elapsed, and the cosey quietude of her drawing-room pleased her.  That room was like an asylum of bourgeois rectitude, luxurious dignity, in which she felt protected, saved.  Some little objects on which her eyes lighted, a pocket scent-bottle ornamented with an opal, a paper-knife of burnished silver left inside a book, fully reassured her.  She was moved,