The afternoon was to be devoted to a horseback ride along the sea-shore.  In the effusion of heart that succeeded the anxieties of the night, I yielded quite readily to the entreaties of Monsieur de Malouet, who, arguing on my approaching departure, was urging me to accompany him on this excursion.  It was about two o’clock when our cavalcade, recruited as usual by a few young men of the neighborhood, marched out of the chateau’s gate.  We had been traveling merrily for a few minutes, and I was not the least merry of the band, when Madame de Palme suddenly came to take her place by my side.

“I am about to be guilty of a base deed,” she said; “and yet, I had so strongly resolved—­but I am choking!”

I looked at her; the haggard expression of her eyes and of her features suddenly struck me with terror.

“Well!” she went on, in a voice of which I shall never forget the tone, “you have willed it so!  I am a disgraced woman!”

She urged at once her horse forward, leaving me crushed by this blow, the more terrible that I had wholly ceased to fear it, and that it struck me with a keen cruelty I had not even foreseen.  There had indeed been in the unhappy woman’s voice no trace whatever of insolent swaggering; it was the very voice of despair, a cry of heart-rending grief and timid reproach; everything that might add in my soul to the torture of a stained and shattered love, the disorder of a profound pity and an uneasy conscience.

When I had found strength enough to look around me I was surprised at my own blindness.  Among Madame de Palme’s most assiduous courtiers, figures one Monsieur de Mauterne, whose antipathy for me, though confined within the limits of good-breeding, often seemed to me to assume an almost hostile tinge.  Monsieur de Mauterne is a man of my age, tall, blonde, with a figure more robust than elegant, and features regularly handsome, but stiff and without expression.  He possesses social accomplishments, much audacity, and no wit.  His bearing and his conduct during the course of that fatal ride would have informed me from the start, if I had only thought of observing them, that he believed he had the right of fearing henceforth no rivalry near Madame de Palme.  He assumed frankly the leading part in all the scenes in which she participated; he overwhelmed her with attentions, affected to speak to her in a whisper, and neglected nothing, in a word, to initiate the public into the secret of his success.  In that respect, he lost his trouble; the world, after exhausting its wickedness upon imaginary errors, seems thus far to refuse the evidence which vainly stares it in the face.