He spent the greater part of the day wandering about Paris, for he dared not go home.  This man of integrity and honor feared to meet the spotless brow of the woman he had misjudged.  We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience; the deed which is scarcely a fault in some hearts, takes the proportions of a crime in certain unsullied souls.  The slightest stain on the white garment of a virgin makes it a thing ignoble as the rags of a mendicant.  Between the two the difference lies in the misfortune of the one, the wrong-doing of the other.  God never measures repentance; he never apportions it.  As much is needed to efface a spot as to obliterate the crimes of a lifetime.  These reflections fell with all their weight on Jules; passions, like human laws, will not pardon, and their reasoning is more just; for are they not based upon a conscience of their own as infallible as an instinct?

Jules finally came home pale, despondent, crushed beneath a sense of his wrong-doing, and yet expressing in spite of himself the joy his wife’s innocence had given him.  He entered her room all throbbing with emotion; she was in bed with a high fever.  He took her hand, kissed it, and covered it with tears.

“Dear angel,” he said, when they were alone, “it is repentance.”

“And for what?” she answered.

As she made that reply, she laid her head back upon the pillow, closed her eyes, and remained motionless, keeping the secret of her sufferings that she might not frighten her husband,—­the tenderness of a mother, the delicacy of an angel!  All the woman was in her answer.

The silence lasted long.  Jules, thinking her asleep, went to question Josephine as to her mistress’s condition.

“Madame came home half-dead, monsieur.  We sent at once for Monsieur Haudry.”

“Did he come?  What did he say?”

“He said nothing, monsieur.  He did not seem satisfied; gave orders that no one should go near madame except the nurse, and said he should come back this evening.”

Jules returned softly to his wife’s room and sat down in a chair before the bed.  There he remained, motionless, with his eyes fixed on those of Clemence.  When she raised her eyelids she saw him, and through those lids passed a tender glance, full of passionate love, free from reproach and bitterness,—­a look which fell like a flame of fire upon the heart of that husband, nobly absolved and forever loved by the being whom he had killed.  The presentiment of death struck both their minds with equal force.  Their looks were blended in one anguish, as their hearts had long been blended in one love, felt equally by both, and shared equally.  No questions were uttered; a horrible certainty was there,—­in the wife an absolute generosity; in the husband an awful remorse; then, in both souls the same vision of the end, the same conviction of fatality.

There came a moment when, thinking his wife asleep, Jules kissed her softly on the forehead; then after long contemplation of that cherished face, he said:—­