She did not offer to go with him.  It would have been a pleasure to her, but she dared not leave Paris.  She knew that she must remain in order to insure the silence of her persecutors.  Both times she had left Paris before, all came near being discovered, and yet she had Aunt Medea, then, to take her place.

Martial went away, accompanied only by his devoted servant, Otto.  In intelligence, this man was decidedly superior to his position; he possessed an independent fortune, and he had a hundred reasons—­one, by the way, was a very pretty one—­for desiring to remain in Paris; but his master was in trouble, and he did not hesitate.

For four years the Duc de Sairmeuse wandered over Europe, ever accompanied by his ennui and his dejection, and chafing beneath the burden of a life no longer animated by interest or sustained by hope.

He remained awhile in London, then he went to Vienna, afterward to Venice.  One day he was seized by an irresistible desire to see Paris again, and he returned.

It was not a very prudent step, perhaps.  His bitterest enemies—­personal enemies, whom he had mortally offended and persecuted—­were in power; but he did not hesitate.  Besides, how could they injure him, since he had no favors to ask, no cravings of ambition to satisfy?

The exile which had weighed so heavily upon him, the sorrow, the disappointments and loneliness he had endured had softened his nature and inclined his heart to tenderness; and he returned firmly resolved to overcome his aversion to his wife, and seek a reconciliation.

“Old age is approaching,” he thought.  “If I have not a beloved wife at my fireside, I may at least have a friend.”

His manner toward her, on his return, astonished Mme. Blanche.  She almost believed she saw again the Martial of the little blue salon at Courtornieu; but the realization of her cherished dream was now only another torture added to all the others.

Martial was striving to carry his plan into execution, when the following laconic epistle came to him one day through the post: 

“Monsieur le Duc—­I, if I were in your place, would watch my wife.”

It was only an anonymous letter, but Martial’s blood mounted to his forehead.

“Can it be that she has a lover?” he thought.

Then reflecting on his own conduct toward his wife since their marriage, he said to himself: 

“And if she has, have I any right to complain?  Did I not tacitly give her back her liberty?”

He was greatly troubled, and yet he would not have degraded himself so much as to play the spy, had it not been for one of those trifling circumstances which so often decide a man’s destiny.

He was returning from a ride on horseback one morning about eleven o’clock, and he was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when he saw a lady hurriedly emerge from the house.  She was very plainly dressed—­entirely in black—­but her whole appearance was strikingly that of the duchess.