“I can’t stop a moment, I have just wished her good day, and now I must be gone.  Farewell, and remember me.”

“Farewell, madam.”

She had hardly gone before M.——­ asked me if the woman was beside herself.

“One might think so, certainly,” I replied, “for she has received nothing but politeness at my hands, and I think she might have waited to go back with you in the evening.”

We went to breakfast and to discuss this abrupt leave-taking, and afterwards we took a turn in the garden where we found Madame Dubois.  M.——­ took possession of her; and as I thought his wife looking rather downcast I asked her if she had not slept well.

“I did not go to sleep till four o’clock this morning,” she replied, “after vainly sitting up in bed waiting for you till that time.  What unforeseen accident prevented your coming?”

I could not answer her question.  I was petrified.  I looked at her fixedly without replying; I could not shake off my astonishment.  At last a dreadful suspicion came into my head that I had held within my arms for two hours the horrible monster whom I had foolishly received in my house.  I was seized with a terrible tremor, which obliged me to go and take shelter behind the arbour and hide my emotion.  I felt as though I should swoon away.  I should certainly have fallen if I had not rested my head against a tree.

My first idea had been a fearful thought, which I hastened to repel, that Madame, having enjoyed me, wished to deny all knowledge of the fact—­a device which is in the power of any woman who gives up her person in the dark to adopt, as it is impossible to convict her of lying.  However, I knew the divine creature I had thought I possessed too well to believe her capable of such base deceit.  I felt that she would have been lacking in delicacy, if she had said she had waited for me in vain by way of a jest; as in such a case as this the least doubt is a degradation.  I was forced, then, to the conclusion that she had been supplanted by the infernal widow.  How had she managed it?  How had she ascertained our arrangements?  I could not imagine, and I bewildered myself with painful surmises.  Reason only comes to the aid of the mind when the confusion produced by painful thoughts has almost vanished.  I concluded, then, that I had spent two hours with this abominable monster; and what increased my anguish, and made me loathe and despise myself still more, was that I could not help confessing that I had been perfectly happy.  It was an unpardonable mistake, as the two women differed as much as white does from black, and though the darkness forbade my seeing, and the silence my hearing, my sense of touch should have enlightened me—­after the first set-to, at all events, but my imagination was in a state of ecstasy.  I cursed love, my nature, and above all the inconceivable weakness which had allowed me to receive into my house the serpent that had deprived me of an angel, and made me hate myself at the thought of having defiled myself with her.  I resolved to die, after having torn to pieces with my own hands the monster who had made me so unhappy.