He was holding his light to Jean’s ashy face, while Gabrielle, leaning over the rail, looked on: 

“It’s not a drunken man,” she said; “he is too white.  Perhaps it is a poor young fellow dying of hunger.  When you’re brought down to rations of bread and horseflesh——­”

Then she looked more carefully under frowning brows, and muttered: 

“It’s very queer, it’s really very queer!”

“Do you know him?” asked Bargemont.

“I am trying to remember——­”

But there was no need to try; already she had recalled it all—­how her hand had been kissed at the gate of the little house at Bellevue.

Running to her rooms, she returned with water and a bottle of ether, knelt beside the fainting man, and slipping her arm, which was encircled by the white band of a nursing sister, under his shoulders, raised Jean’s head.  He opened his eyes, saw her, heaved the deepest sigh of love ever expelled from a human breast and felt his lids fall softly to again.  He remembered nothing; only she was bending over him; and her breath had caressed his cheek.  Now she was bathing his temples, and he felt a delicious sense of returning life.  Monsieur Bargemont with the candle leant over Jean Servien, who, opening his eyes for the second time, saw the man’s coarse red cheek within an inch of the actress’s delicate ear.  He gave a great cry and a convulsive spasm shook his body.

“Perhaps it is an epileptic fit,” said Monsieur Bargemont, coughing; he was catching cold standing on the staircase.

She protested: 

“We cannot leave a sick man without doing something for him.  Go and wake Rosalie.”

He remounted the stairs, grumbling.  Meantime Jean had got to his feet and was standing with averted head.

She said to him in a low tone: 

“So you love me still?”

He looked at her with an indescribable sadness: 

“No, I don’t love you any longer”—­and he staggered down the stairs.

Monsieur Bargemont reappeared: 

“It’s very curious,” he said, “but I can’t make Rosalie hear.”

The actress shrugged her shoulders.

“Look here, go away, will you?  I have a horrid headache.  Go away, Bargemont.”

XXX

She was Bargemont’s mistress!  The thought was torture to Jean Servien, the more atrocious from the unexpectedness of the discovery.  He both hated and despised the coarse ruffian whose sham good-nature did not impose on him, and whom he knew for a brutal, dull-witted, mean-spirited bully.  That pimply face, those goggle eyes, that forehead with the swollen black vein running across it, that heavy hand, that ugly, vulgar soul, could it be——­ It sickened him to think of it!  And disgust was the thing of all others Servien’s delicately balanced nature felt most keenly.  His morality was shaky, and he could have found excuse for elegant vices, refined perversions, romantic crimes.  But Bargemont and his pot of butter!...  Never to possess the most adorable of women, never to see her more, he was quite willing for the sacrifice still, but to know her in the arms of that coarse brute staggered the mind and rendered life impossible.