She withdrew her hand slowly while he was trying to seize it.

“You have nothing to thank me for,” she said.  “I am a partner, saving, as I best can, the honor of the house.  That association is better than Molina’s.”

“Adieu,” she added bitterly.

“Are you going—?  Going away?” asked Sulpice, trying to give to his entreaty something like an echo of the love of the former days.

“Whose fault is it?” replied the young woman, in a voice as chilly as steel.

She was no longer the Adrienne of old, the little timid provincial with blushing cheek and trembling gesture.  Sorrow, the most terrible of disillusions, had hardened and, as it were, petrified her.  Vaudrey felt that to ask forgiveness would be in vain.  Time only could soften that poor woman, obstinately unbending in her grief.  He needed but to observe her attitude and cutting tones to fully realize that.

“It is quite understood,” she continued, treating this question of her happiness as if she were cutting deep into her flesh and severing the tenderest fibres of her being, but without trembling,—­“it is quite understood, is it not, that we shall make no scene or scandal?  We are separated neither judicially nor even in appearance.  We live apart by mutual consent, far from each other, without anything being known by outsiders of this definitive rupture.”

“Adrienne!” Sulpice repeated, “it is impossible, you will not leave!”

“Oh!” she said.  “I gave myself and I have taken myself back.  Your entreaties will not now alter my determination.  I am eager to leave Paris.  It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over my body!—­I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!”

“Well, let it be so!” exclaimed Vaudrey.  “Go!  But if it is a stranger who leaves me, I will accept nothing from her.  Here is the authority.  Will you take it back?”

“I?  No, I will not take it back!  If you desire me to be worthy of the name that you have given me, keep it honored, at least, in the sight of the world, since to betray a woman, to mock and insult her, is not dishonoring.  I alone have the right to save you from shame.  Do not deny me the privilege that I claim.  I do not desire that the man who has been my husband should descend to the questionable intrigues of a Molina.  You have outraged me enough, do not impose this last insult on me!”

“For the last time, adieu!”

She went out, and he allowed her to disappear, overwhelmed by this living mourning of a faith.  She fled and he allowed her to descend the stairway, followed by her femme de chambre.  She entered the carriage that was waiting for her below, in Rue Chaussee-d’Antin, but he had not the courage, hopeless as he was, to follow the carriage whose rumbling he heard above the noise of the street as it rolled away more quickly and more heavily than the others, and it seemed to him that its wheels had crushed his bosom.