Mme. la Comtesse de Nueil, Gaston’s mother, a strait-laced and virtuous person, who had made the late Baron happy in strictly legal fashion would never consent to meet Mme. de Beauseant.  Mme. de Beauseant quite understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity be her enemy, and that she would try to draw Gaston from his unhallowed and immoral way of life.  The Marquise de Beauseant would willingly have sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M. de Nueil.  Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy estate, where he was making plantations and improvements.  She would not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their husbands, and even for their lovers.

A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the neighborhood.  Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was obliged to go thither.  These various personages being to each other as the terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light on the appalling problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying for the past month to solve:—­

“My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to write to you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a caress so often takes the place of words, and words too are caresses?  Ah, well, no, love.  There are some things that a woman cannot say when she is face to face with the man she loves; at the bare thought of them her voice fails her, and the blood goes back to her heart; she has no strength, no intelligence left.  It hurts me to feel like this when you are near me, and it happens often.  I feel that my heart should be wholly sincere for you; that I should disguise no thought, however transient, in my heart; and I love the sweet carelessness, which suits me so well, too much to endure this embarrassment and constraint any longer.  So I will tell you about my anguish—­yes, it is anguish.  Listen to me! do not begin with the little ‘Tut, tut, tut,’ that you use to silence me, an impertinence that I love, because anything from you pleases me.  Dear soul from heaven, wedded to mine, let me first tell you that you have effaced all memory of the pain that once was crushing the life out of me.  I did not know what love was before I knew you.  Only the candor of your beautiful young life, only the purity of that great soul of yours, could satisfy the requirements of an exacting woman’s heart.  Dear love, how very often I have thrilled with joy to think that in these nine long, swift years, my jealousy has not been once awakened.  All the flowers of your soul have been mine, all your thoughts.  There has not been the faintest cloud in our heaven; we have not known what sacrifice is; we have always acted on the impulses of our hearts.  I have known happiness, infinite for a woman.  Will the tears