“You are suffering, my poor Jacqueline!” he ventured to say.

“Oh! not much,” she answered, with a glance at once haughty and defiant, “to-morrow I shall be quite well again.”

And, saying this, she had the courage to laugh.

But she was not quite well the next day; and for many days after she was forced to stay in bed.  The doctor who came to see her talked about “low fever,” attributed it to too rapid growth, and prescribed sea-bathing for her that summer.  The fever, which was not very severe, was of great service to Jacqueline.  It enabled her to recover in quiet from the effects of a bitter deception.

Madame de Nailles was not sufficiently uneasy about her to be always at her bedside.  Usually the sick girl stayed alone, with her window-curtains closed, lying there in the soft half-light that was soothing to her nerves.  The silence was broken at intervals by the voice of Modeste, who would come and offer her her medicine.  When Jacqueline had taken it, she would shut her eyes, and resume, half asleep, her sad reflections.  These were always the same.  What could be the tie between her stepmother and Marien?

She tried to recall all the proofs of friendship she had seen pass between them, but all had taken place openly.  Nothing that she could remember seemed suspicious.  So she thought at first, but as she thought more, lying, feverish, upon her bed, several things, little noticed at the time, were recalled to her remembrance.  They might mean nothing, or they might mean much.  In the latter case, Jacqueline could not understand them very well.  But she knew he had called her “Clotilde,” that he had even dared to say “thou” to her in private—­these were things she knew of her own knowledge.  Her pulse beat quicker as she thought of them; her head burned.  In that studio, where she had passed so many happy hours, had Marien and her stepmother ever met as lovers?

Her stepmother and Marien!  She could not understand what it meant.  Must she apply to them a dreadful word that she had picked up in the history books, where it had been associated with such women as Margaret of Burgundy, Isabeau of Bavaria, Anne Boleyn, and other princesses of very evil reputation?  She had looked it out in the dictionary, where the meaning given was:  “To be unfaithful to conjugal vows.”  Even then she could not understand precisely the meaning of adultery, and she set herself to solve it during the long lonely days when she was convalescent.  When she was able to walk from one room to another, she wandered in a loose dressing-gown, whose long, lank folds showed that she had grown taller and thinner during her illness, into the room that held the books, and went boldly up to the bookcase, the key of which had been left in the lock, for everybody had entire confidence in Jacqueline’s scrupulous honesty.  Never before had she broken a promise; she knew that a well-brought-up young girl ought to read only such books as were put into her hands.