“Did you leave the balcony, sir,” I asked, “when Mdlle.  Varens entered?”

I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question, but, on the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his eyes towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow.  “Oh, I had forgotten Celine!  Well, to resume.  When I saw my charmer thus come in accompanied by a cavalier, I seemed to hear a hiss, and the green snake of jealousy, rising on undulating coils from the moonlit balcony, glided within my waistcoat, and ate its way in two minutes to my heart’s core.  Strange!” he exclaimed, suddenly starting again from the point.  “Strange that I should choose you for the confidant of all this, young lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his opera-mistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you!  But the last singularity explains the first, as I intimated once before:  you, with your gravity, considerateness, and caution were made to be the recipient of secrets.  Besides, I know what sort of a mind I have placed in communication with my own:  I know it is one not liable to take infection:  it is a peculiar mind:  it is a unique one.  Happily I do not mean to harm it:  but, if I did, it would not take harm from me.  The more you and I converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me.”  After this digression he proceeded —

“I remained in the balcony.  ’They will come to her boudoir, no doubt,’ thought I:  ‘let me prepare an ambush.’  So putting my hand in through the open window, I drew the curtain over it, leaving only an opening through which I could take observations; then I closed the casement, all but a chink just wide enough to furnish an outlet to lovers’ whispered vows:  then I stole back to my chair; and as I resumed it the pair came in.  My eye was quickly at the aperture.  Celine’s chamber-maid entered, lit a lamp, left it on the table, and withdrew.  The couple were thus revealed to me clearly:  both removed their cloaks, and there was ‘the Varens,’ shining in satin and jewels, —­ my gifts of course, —­ and there was her companion in an officer’s uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte —­ a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely.  On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine sank under an extinguisher.  A woman who could betray me for such a rival was not worth contending for; she deserved only scorn; less, however, than I, who had been her dupe.