Poor Claire herself knew something about it; for she had never forgotten, notwithstanding her great courage and the conception she had formed of her duty.  To her, as to Risler; her surroundings were a constant reminder of her sufferings.  The objects amid which she lived pitilessly reopened the wound that was ready to close.  The staircase, the garden, the courtyard, all those dumb witnesses of her husband’s sin, assumed on certain days an implacable expression.  Even the careful precaution her husband took to spare her painful reminders, the way in which he called attention to the fact that he no longer went out in the evening, and took pains to tell her where he had been during the day, served only to remind her the more forcibly of his wrong-doing.  Sometimes she longed to ask him to forbear,—­to say to him:  “Do not protest too much.”  Faith was shattered within her, and the horrible agony of the priest who doubts, and seeks at the same time to remain faithful to his vows, betrayed itself in her bitter smile, her cold, uncomplaining gentleness.

Georges was wofully unhappy.  He loved his wife now.  The nobility of her character had conquered him.  There was admiration in his love, and—­why not say it?—­Claire’s sorrow filled the place of the coquetry which was contrary to her nature, the lack of which had always been a defect in her husband’s eyes.  He was one of that strange type of men who love to make conquests.  Sidonie, capricious and cold as she was, responded to that whim of his heart.  After parting from her with a tender farewell, he found her indifferent and forgetful the next day, and that continual need of wooing her back to him took the place of genuine passion.  Serenity in love bored him as a voyage without storms wearies a sailor.  On this occasion he had been very near shipwreck with his wife, and the danger had not passed even yet.  He knew that Claire was alienated from him and devoted entirely to the child, the only link between them thenceforth.  Their separation made her seem lovelier, more desirable, and he exercised all his powers of fascination to recapture her.  He knew how hard a task it would be, and that he had no ordinary, frivolous nature to deal with.  But he did not despair.  Sometimes a vague gleam in the depths of the mild and apparently impassive glance with which she watched his efforts, bade him hope.

As for Sidonie, he no longer thought of her.  Let no one be astonished at that abrupt mental rupture.  Those two superficial beings had nothing to attach them securely to each other.  Georges was incapable of receiving lasting impressions unless they were continually renewed; Sidonie, for her part, had no power to inspire any noble or durable sentiment.  It was one of those intrigues between a cocotte and a coxcomb, compounded of vanity and of wounded self-love, which inspire neither devotion nor constancy, but tragic adventures, duels, suicides which are rarely fatal, and which end in a radical cure.  Perhaps,