“Who is it?” he asked.

She replied in a stifled voice: 

“You know very well that it is you.”

She was his brother’s wife.

For two years he had not thought of her except as a sister.  In his eyes his brother’s wife in no way resembled his former fiancee, and it would have been a crime to recognize in a single feature of her face the woman to whom he had formerly so often said, “I love you.”

And now it was she who said that she loved him.

The unhappy judge was thunderstruck, dazed, could find no words in which to reply.

She, standing before him, waited.

It was one of those spring days, full of heat and light, to which the moisture of recent rains imparts a strange softness and melancholy.  The air was warm, perfumed by fresh flowers which, on that first day of heat, gave forth their fragrance eagerly, like violets hidden in a muff.  Through its long, open windows the room in which they were inhaled all those intoxicating odors.  Outside, they could hear the Sunday organs, distant shouts on the river, and nearer at hand, in the garden, Madame Dobson’s amorous, languishing voice, sighing: 

          “On dit que tu te maries;
          Tu sais que j’en puis mouri-i-i-r!”

“Yes, Frantz, I have always loved you,” said Sidonie.  “That love which I renounced long ago because I was a young girl—­and young girls do not know what they are doing—­that love nothing has ever succeeded in destroying or lessening.  When I learned that Desiree also loved you, the unfortunate, penniless child, in a great outburst of generosity I determined to assure her happiness for life by sacrificing my own, and I at once turned you away, so that you should go to her.  Ah! as soon as you had gone, I realized that the sacrifice was beyond my strength.  Poor little Desiree!  How I cursed her in the bottom of my heart!  Will you believe it?  Since that time I have avoided seeing her, meeting her.  The sight of her caused me too much pain.”

“But if you loved me,” asked Frantz, in a low voice, “if you loved me, why did you marry my brother?”

She did not waver.

“To marry Risler was to bring myself nearer to you.  I said to myself:  ’I could not be his wife.  Very well, I will be his sister.  At all events, in that way it will still be allowable for me to love him, and we shall not pass our whole lives as strangers.’  Alas! those are the innocent dreams a girl has at twenty, dreams of which she very soon learns the impossibility.  I could not love you as a sister, Frantz; I could not forget you, either; my marriage prevented that.  With another husband I might perhaps have succeeded, but with Risler it was terrible.  He was forever talking about you and your success and your future—­Frantz said this; Frantz did that—­He loves you so well, poor fellow!  And then the most cruel thing to me is that your brother looks like you.  There is a sort of family resemblance in your features,