“Ah!” said Durtal, dumbfounded by the placid and resolute air of this woman, “but suppose he had strangled you first?”

She shrugged her shoulders and picked a cat hair off her skirt.

“The result,” he resumed after a silence, “being that you are now almost free, that your second husband tolerates—­”

“Let us not discuss my second husband.  He is an excellent man who deserves a better wife.  I have absolutely no reason to speak of Chantelouve otherwise than with praise, and then—­oh, let’s talk of something else, for I have had sufficient botheration on this subject from my confessor, who interdicts me from the Holy Table.”

He contemplated her, and saw yet another Hyacinthe, a hard, pertinacious woman whom he had not known.  Not a sign nor an accent of emotion, nothing, while she was describing the suicide of her first husband—­she did not even seem to imagine that she had a crime on her conscience.  She remained pitiless, and yet, a moment ago, when she was commiserating him because of his fictitious parenthood, he had thought she was trembling.  “After all, perhaps she is acting a part—­like myself.”

He remained awed by the turn the conversation had taken.  He sought, mentally, a way of getting back to the subject from which Hyacinthe had diverted him, of the Satanism of Canon Docre.

“Well, let us think of that no more,” she said, coming very near.  She smiled, and was once more the Hyacinthe he knew.

“But if on my account you can no longer take communion—­”

She interrupted him.  “Would you be sorry if I did not love you?” and she kissed his eyes.  He squeezed her politely in his arms, but he felt her trembling, and from motives of prudence he got away.

“Is he so inexorable, your confessor?”

“He is an incorruptible man, of the old school.  I chose him expressly.”

“If I were a woman it seems to me I should take, on the contrary, a confessor who was pliable and caressible and who would not violently pillory my dainty little sins.  I would have him indulgent, oiling the hinges of confession, enticing forth with beguiling gestures the misdeeds that hung back.  It is true there would be risk of seducing a confessor who perhaps would be defenceless—­”

“And that would be incest, because the priest is a spiritual father, and it would also be sacrilege, because the priest is consecrated.—­Oh,” speaking to herself, “I was mad, mad—­” suddenly carried away.

He observed her; sparks glinted in the myopic eyes of this extraordinary woman.  Evidently he had just stumbled, unwittingly, onto a guilty secret of hers.

“Well,” and he smiled, “do you still commit infidelities to me with a false me?”

“I do not understand.”

“Do you receive, at night, the visit of the incubus which resembles me?”

“No.  Since I have been able to possess you in the flesh I have no need to evoke your image.”