It might be supposed that Tremorel, enslaved by his horrid position, and harassed by increasing terror, would renounce forever his proposed marriage with Laurence.  Not so.  He clung to that project more desperately than ever.  Bertha’s threats, the great obstacles now intervening, his anguish, crime, only augmented the violence of his love for her, and fed the flame of his ambition to secure her as his wife.  A small and flickering ray of hope which lighted the darkness of his despair, consoled and revived him, and made the present more easy to bear.  He said to himself that Bertha could not be thinking of marrying him the day after her husband’s death.  Months, a whole year must pass, and thus he would gain time; then some day he would declare his will.  What would she have to say?  Would she divulge the crime, and try to hold him as her accomplice?  Who would believe her?  How could she prove that he, who loved and had married another woman, had any interest in Sauvresy’s death?  People don’t kill their friends for the mere pleasure of it.  Would she provoke the law to exhume her husband?  She was now in a position, thought he, wherein she could, or would not exercise her reason.  Later on, she would reflect, and then she would be arrested by the probability of those dangers, the certainty of which did not now terrify her.

He did not wish that she should ever be his wife at any price.  He would have detested her had she possessed millions; he hated her now that she was poor, ruined, reduced to her own narrow means.  And that she was so, there was no doubt, Sauvresy indeed knew all.  He was content to wait; he knew that Laurence loved him enough to wait for him one, or three years, if necessary.  He already had such absolute power over her, that she did not try to combat the thoughts of him, which gently forced themselves on her, penetrated to her soul, and filled her mind and heart.  Hector said to himself that in the interest of his designs, perhaps it was well that Bertha was acting as she did.  He forced himself to stifle his conscience in trying to prove that he was not guilty.  Who thought of this crime?  Bertha.  Who was executing it?  She alone.  He could only be reproached with moral complicity in it, a complicity involuntary, forced upon him, imposed somehow by the care for his own life.  Sometimes, however, a bitter remorse seized him.  He could have understood a sudden, violent, rapid murder; could have explained to himself a knife-stroke; but this slow death, given drop by drop, horribly sweetened by tenderness, veiled under kisses, appeared to him unspeakably hideous.  He was mortally afraid of Bertha, as of a reptile, and when she embraced him he shuddered from head to foot.

She was so calm, so engaging, so natural; her voice had the same soft and caressing tones, that he could not forget it.  She plunged her hair-pin into the fatal vial without ceasing her conversation, and he did not surprise her in any shrinking or shuddering, nor even a trembling of the eyelids.  She must have been made of brass.  Yet he thought that she was not cautious enough; and that she put herself in danger of discovery; and he told her of these fears, and how she made him tremble every moment.