When Helene had shut the house door and reached the pavement, she drew the letter with a violent, almost mechanical gesture from her pocket, and dropped it into the letter-box.  Then she stood motionless for a few seconds, still dazed, her eyes glaring at the narrow brass plate which had fallen back again in its place.

“It is done,” she exclaimed in a whisper.

Once more she pictured the rooms hung with pink cretonne.  Malignon and Juliette were there together; but all of a sudden the wall was riven open, and the husband entered.  She was conscious of no more, and a great calm fell on her.  Instinctively she looked around to see if any one had observed her dropping the letter in the box.  But the street was deserted.  Then she turned the corner and went back home.

“Have you been good, my darling?” she asked as she kissed Jeanne.

The child, still seated on the same chair, raised a gloomy face towards her, and without answering threw both arms around her neck, and kissed her with a great gasp.  Her grief indeed had been intense.

At lunch-time Rosalie seemed greatly surprised.  “Madame surely went for a long walk!” said she.

“Why do you think so?” asked Helene.

“Because madame is eating with such an appetite.  It is long since madame ate so heartily.”

It was true; she was very hungry; with her sudden relief she had felt her stomach empty.  She experienced a feeling of intense peace and content.  After the shocks of these last two days a stillness fell upon her spirit, her limbs relaxed and became as supple as though she had just left a bath.  The only sensation that remained to her was one of heaviness somewhere, an indefinable load that weighed upon her.

When she returned to her bedroom her eyes were at once directed towards the clock, the hands of which pointed to twenty-five minutes past twelve.  Juliette’s assignation was for three o’clock.  Two hours and a half must still elapse.  She made the reckoning mechanically.  Moreover, she was in no hurry; the hands of the clock were moving on, and no one in the world could stop them.  She left things to their own accomplishment.  A child’s cap, long since begun, was lying unfinished on the table.  She took it up and began to sew at the window.  The room was plunged in unbroken silence.  Jeanne had seated herself in her usual place, but her arms hung idly beside her.

“Mamma,” she said, “I cannot work; it’s no fun at all.”

“Well, my darling, don’t do anything.  Oh! wait a minute, you can thread my needles!”

In a languid way the child silently attended to the duty assigned her.  Having carefully cut some equal lengths of cotton, she spent a long time in finding the eyes of the needles, and was only just ready with one of them threaded when her mother had finished with the last.

“You see,” said the latter gently, “this will save time.  The last of my six little caps will be finished to-night.”