All night poor Jacqueline wept with such distress that she wished that she might die.  She was dropping off to sleep at last, overpowered by fatigue, when a ring at the bell in the early morning roused her.  Then she heard whispering: 

“Do you think she is so unhappy?”

It was the voice of Giselle.

“Come in—­come in quickly!” she cried, springing out of bed.  Wrapped in a dressing-gown, with bare feet, her face pale, her eyelids red, her complexion clouded, she rushed to meet her friend, who was almost as much disordered as herself.  It seemed as if Madame de Talbrun might also have passed a night of sleeplessness and tears.

“You have come!  Oh! you have come at last!” cried Jacqueline, throwing her arms around her, but Giselle repelled her with a gesture so severe that the poor child could not but understand its meaning.  She murmured, pointing to the pile of newspapers:  “Is it possible?—­Can you have believed all those dreadful things?”

“What things?  I have read nothing,” said Giselle, harshly.  “I only know that a man who was neither your husband nor your brother, and who consequently was under no obligation to defend you, has been foolish enough to be nearly killed for your sake.  Is not that a proof of your downfall?  Don’t you know it?”

“Downfall?” repeated Jacqueline, as if she did not understand her.  Then, seizing her friend’s hand, she forcibly raised it to her lips:  “Ah! what can anything matter to me,” she cried, “if only you remain my friend; and he has never doubted me!”

“Women like you can always find defenders,” said Giselle, tearing her hand from her cousin’s grasp.

Giselle was not herself at that moment.  “But, for your own sake, it would have been better he should have abstained from such an act of Quixotism.”

“Giselle! can it be that you think me guilty?”

“Guilty!” cried Madame de Talbrun, her pale face aflame.  “A little more and Monsieur de Cymier’s sword-point would have pierced his lungs.”

“Good heavens!” cried Jacqueline, hiding her face in her hands.  “But I have done nothing to—­”

“Nothing except to set two men against each other; to make them suffer, or to make fools of them, and to be loved by them all the same.”

“I have not been a coquette,” said Jacqueline, with indignation.

“You must have been, to authorize the boasts of Monsieur de Cymier.  He had seen Fred so seldom, and Tonquin had so changed him that he spoke in his presence—­without supposing any one would interfere.  I dare not tell you what he said—­”

“Whatever spite or revenge suggested to him, no doubt,” said Jacqueline.

“Listen, Giselle—­Oh, you must listen.  I shall not be long.”

She forced her to sit down; she crouched on a foot stool at her feet, holding her hands in hers so tightly that Giselle could not draw them away, and began her story, with all its details, of what had happened to her since she left Fresne.  She told of her meeting with Wanda; of the fatal evening which had resulted in her expulsion from the convent; her disgust at the Sparks family; the snare prepared for her by Madame Strahlberg.  “And I can not tell you all,” she added, “I can not tell you what drove me away from my true friends, and threw me among these people—­”