Care was taken that no mention of the duel should be made to Mlle. Moriaz, and not a word concerning it reached her; her condition for a long time caused the gravest anxiety.  After she became convalescent she remained sunk in a gloomy, taciturn sadness.  She never made the least allusion to what had passed, and would not permit any one to speak of it to her.  She had been deceived, and a mortification, mingled with dread, was the result of her mistake.  It seemed to her that nothing remained in life for her but remembrance and silence.

Towards the end of November, M. Moriaz proposed to her that they should return to Paris.  She expressed her desire not to leave Cormeilles—­to pass the winter in solitude; the human face terrified her.  M. Moriaz tried to represent to her that she was unreasonable.

“Will you wear eternal mourning for a stranger?” he asked; “for, in reality, the man that you loved you never saw.  Ah! mon Dieu, you deceived, you deluded yourself.  Is there, I will not say a single woman, but a single member of the Institute, who has not once been grossly imposed on?  It is through the means of failures in experiments that science progresses.”

And he rose to still higher considerations; he endeavoured to prove to her that, if it is bad to have erred, an excessive fear of erring is a still worse evil, because it is better to lose one’s way than not to walk at all.

When he had finished his harangue, she said, shaking her head, “I have no longer faith in any one.”

“What! not even in the brave fellow to whom you owe the recovery of your portrait and your letters?”

“Of whom do you speak?” she exclaimed.

Then he declared to her how M. Langis had effected the descent into the den, without telling her what had resulted therefrom.

“Ah! that was kind, very kind,” she said.  “I never doubted that Camille was a true friend.”

“A friend?  Are you very sure that it is only friendship that he feels for you?”

Whereupon M. Moriaz told her all the rest.  She grew pensive and sank into a reverie.  Suddenly the door of the salon opened, and Camille entered.  After inquiring after her health, he informed her that in consequence of a cold he, too, had been sick; and, as he was now free from business engagements, his physician was sending him to pass the winter in Sorrento.

She replied:  “That is a journey that I would like to make.  Will you take me with you?”

She gazed fixedly at him; there was everything in her gaze.  He bent his knee before her, and for some moments they remained hand-in-hand, and eye to eye.  In the midst of this, Mlle. Moiseney appeared, who, at sight of this tableau vivant, stood perfectly confounded.

“You are very much astonished, mademoiselle,” said M. Moriaz to her.

“Not so much as you fancy, monsieur,” replied she, recovering herself.  “I did not dare to say it, but in my heart I always believed, always thought—­Yes, I always was sure that it would end thus.”