upon his unwilling memory.  He could not help remembering her footsteps, the rustle of her dress, her way of holding her head, her decisive manner of saying “Alvan,” the quiver of her nostrils when she was annoyed.  All that had been so much his property, so intimately and specially his!  He raged in a mournful, silent way, as he took stock of his losses.  He was like a man counting the cost of an unlucky speculation—­irritated, depressed—­exasperated with himself and with others, with the fortunate, with the indifferent, with the callous; yet the wrong done him appeared so cruel that he would perhaps have dropped a tear over that spoliation if it had not been for his conviction that men do not weep.  Foreigners do; they also kill sometimes in such circumstances.  And to his horror he felt himself driven to regret almost that the usages of a society ready to forgive the shooting of a burglar forbade him, under the circumstances, even as much as a thought of murder.  Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and set his teeth hard.  And he was afraid at the same time.  He was afraid with that penetrating faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one’s heart into a handful of dust.  The contamination of her crime spread out, tainted the universe, tainted himself; woke up all the dormant infamies of the world; caused a ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which he could see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples and its houses, peopled by monsters—­by monsters of duplicity, lust, and murder.  She was a monster—­he himself was thinking monstrous thoughts . . . and yet he was like other people.  How many men and women at this very moment were plunged in abominations—­meditated crimes.  It was frightful to think of.  He remembered all the streets—­the well-to-do streets he had passed on his way home; all the innumerable houses with closed doors and curtained windows.  Each seemed now an abode of anguish and folly.  And his thought, as if appalled, stood still, recalling with dismay the decorous and frightful silence that was like a conspiracy; the grim, impenetrable silence of miles of walls concealing passions, misery, thoughts of crime.  Surely he was not the only man; his was not the only house . . . and yet no one knew—­no one guessed.  But he knew.  He knew with unerring certitude that could not be deceived by the correct silence of walls, of closed doors, of curtained windows.  He was beside himself with a despairing agitation, like a man informed of a deadly secret—­the secret of a calamity threatening the safety of mankind—­the sacredness, the peace of life.