She tried to eat, but could swallow nothing.

At two o’clock she returned to the little house of the Ternes.  She found Jacques in his room.  He was smoking a wooden pipe.  A cup of coffee almost empty was on the table.  He looked at her with a harshness that chilled her.  She dared not talk, feeling that everything that she could say would offend and irritate him, and yet she knew that in remaining discreet and dumb she intensified his anger.  He knew that she would return; he had waited for her with impatience.  A sudden light came to her, and she saw that she had done wrong to come; that if she had been absent he would have desired, wanted, called for her, perhaps.  But it was too late; and, at all events, she was not trying to be crafty.

She said to him: 

“You see I have returned.  I could not do otherwise.  And then it was natural, since I love you.  And you know it.”

She knew very well that all she could say would only irritate him.  He asked her whether that was the way she spoke in the Rue Spontini.

She looked at him with sadness.

“Jacques, you have often told me that there were hatred and anger in your heart against me.  You like to make me suffer.  I can see it.”

With ardent patience, at length, she told him her entire life, the little that she had put into it; the sadness of the past; and how, since he had known her, she had lived only through him and in him.

The words fell as limpid as her look.  She sat near him.  He listened to her with bitter avidity.  Cruel with himself, he wished to know everything about her last meetings with the other.  She reported faithfully the events of the Great Britain Hotel; but she changed the scene to the outside, in an alley of the Casino, from fear that the image of their sad interview in a closed room should irritate her lover.  Then she explained the meeting at the station.  She had not wished to cause despair to a suffering man who was so violent.  But since then she had had no news from him until the day when he spoke to her on the street.  She repeated what she had replied to him.  Two days later she had seen him at the opera, in her box.  Certainly, she had not encouraged him to come.  It was the truth.

It was the truth.  But the old poison, slowly accumulating in his mind, burned him.  She made the past, the irreparable past, present to him, by her avowals.  He saw images of it which tortured him.  He said: 

“I do not believe you.”

And he added: 

“And if I believed you, I could not see you again, because of the idea that you have loved that man.  I have told you, I have written to you, you remember, that I did not wish him to be that man.  And since—­”

He stopped.

She said: 

“You know very well that since then nothing has happened.”

He replied, with violence: 

“Since then I have seen him.”