But each time, though he martyrized his soul in patience, he was forced to bring up the question that would not let him rest.

He could not understand why she did not save him this useless agony.  Sometimes when he wanted to find an excuse he said to himself it was because she felt humiliated that he should still doubt.  At other times, he stumbled on explanations that terrified him.  Then he remembered with bitterness the promise that he had exacted from her, a promise that, instead of bringing him peace, had left only an endless torment, and forgetting all his protestations he would cry to himself, in a cold perspiration: 

“Ah, if she is really lying, how can I ever be sure?”

III

In the eighth year, Madeleine Conti retired from the stage and announced her marriage.  After five years of complete happiness she was taken suddenly ill, as the result of exposure to a drenching storm.  One afternoon, as he waited by her bedside, talking in broken tones of all that they had been to each other, he said to her in a voice that he tried nervously to school to quietness: 

“Madeleine, you know that our life together has been without the slightest shadow from the first.  You know we have proved to each other how immense our love has been.  In all these years I have grown in maturity and understanding.  I regret only one thing, and I have regretted it bitterly, every day—­that I once asked you, if—­if ever for a moment another man came into your life to hide it from me, to tell me a lie.  It was a great mistake.  I have never ceased to regret it.  Our love has been so above all worldly things that there ought not to be the slightest concealment between us.  I release you from that promise.  Tell me now the truth.  It will mean nothing to me.  During the eight years when we were separated there were—­there must have been times, times of loneliness, of weakness, when other men came into your life.  Weren’t there?”

She turned and looked at him steadily, her large eyes seeming larger and more brilliant from the heightened fever of her cheeks.  Then she made a little negative sign of her head, still looking at him.

“No, never.”

“You don’t understand, Madeleine,” he said, dissatisfied, “or you are still thinking of what I said to you there in Etretat.  That was thirteen years ago.  Then I had just begun to love you, I feared for the future, for everything.  Now I have tested you, and I have never had a doubt.  I know the difference between the flesh and the spirit.  I know your two selves; I know how impossible it would have been otherwise.  Now you can tell me.”

“There is nothing—­to tell,” she said slowly.

“I expected that you would have other men who loved you about you,” he said, feverishly.  “I knew it would be so.  I swear to you I expected it.  I know why you continue to deny it.  It’s for my sake, isn’t it?  I love you for it.  But, believe me, in such a moment there ought nothing to stand between us.  Madeleine, Madeleine, I beg you, tell me the truth.”