The lodge was full.  Coachmen were warming themselves around the stove, chatting and laughing amid the smoke from their pipes.  When Risler appeared there was profound silence, a cunning, inquisitive, significant silence.  They had evidently been speaking of him.

“Is the Fromont child still sick?” he asked.

“No, not the child, Monsieur.”

“Monsieur Georges sick?”

“Yes, he was taken when he came home to-night.  I went right off to get the doctor.  He said that it wouldn’t amount to anything—­that all Monsieur needed was rest.”

As Risler closed the door Pere Achille added, under his breath, with the half-fearful, half-audacious insolence of an inferior, who would like to be listened to and yet not distinctly heard: 

“Ah! ‘dame’, they’re not making such a show on the first floor as they are on the second.”

This is what had happened.

Fromont jeune, on returning home during the evening, had found his wife with such a changed, heartbroken face, that he at once divined a catastrophe.  But he had become so accustomed in the past two years to sin with impunity that it did not for one moment occur to him that his wife could have been informed of his conduct.  Claire, for her part, to avoid humiliating him, was generous enough to speak only of Savigny.

“Grandpapa refused,” she said.

The miserable man turned frightfully pale.

“I am lost—­I am lost!” he muttered two or three times in the wild accents of fever; and his sleepless nights, a last terrible scene which he had had with Sidonie, trying to induce her not to give this party on the eve of his downfall, M. Gardinois’ refusal, all these maddening things which followed so closely on one another’s heels and had agitated him terribly, culminated in a genuine nervous attack.  Claire took pity on him, put him to bed, and established herself by his side; but her voice had lost that affectionate intonation which soothes and persuades.  There was in her gestures, in the way in which she arranged the pillow under the patient’s head and prepared a quieting draught, a strange indifference, listlessness.

“But I have ruined you!” Georges said from time to time, as if to rouse her from that apathy which made him uncomfortable.  She replied with a proud, disdainful gesture.  Ah! if he had done only that to her!

At last, however, his nerves became calmer, the fever subsided, and he fell asleep.

She remained to attend to his wants.

“It is my duty,” she said to herself.

Her duty.  She had reached that point with the man whom she had adored so blindly, with the hope of a long and happy life together.

At that moment the ball in Sidonie’s apartments began to become very animated.  The ceiling trembled rhythmically, for Madame had had all the carpets removed from her salons for the greater comfort of the dancers.  Sometimes, too, the sound of voices reached Claire’s ears in waves, and frequent tumultuous applause, from which one could divine the great number of the guests, the crowded condition of the rooms.