’Do you think that I did not wish to see you also?  Louis, why do you do me so much wrong?  Why do you treat me with such cruelty?’ Then she threw her arms round his neck, and before he could repulse her before he could reflect whether it would be well that he should repulse her or not she had covered his brow and cheeks and lips with kisses.  ‘Louis,’ she said; ‘Louis, speak to me!’

‘It is hard to speak sometimes,’ he said.

‘You love me, Louis?’

‘Yes I love you.  But I am afraid of you!’

’What is it that you fear?  I would give my life for you, if you would only come back to me and let me feel that you believed me to be true.’  He shook his head, and began to think while she still clung to him.  He was quite sure that her father and mother had intended to bring a mad doctor down upon him, and he knew that his wife was in her mother’s hands.  Should he yield to her now, should he make her any promise, might not the result be that he would be shut up in dark rooms, robbed of his liberty, robbed of what he loved better than his liberty, his power as a man.  She would thus get the better of him and take the child, and the world would say that in this contest between him and her he had been the sinning one, and she the one against whom the sin had been done.  It was the chief object of his mind, the one thing for which he was eager, that this should never come to pass.  Let it once be conceded to him from all sides that he had been right, and then she might do with him almost as she willed.  He knew well that he was ill.  When he thought of his child, he would tell himself that he was dying.  He was at some moments of his miserable existence fearfully anxious to come to terms with his wife, in order that at his death his boy might not be without a protector.  Were he to die, then it would be better that his child should be with its mother.  In his happy days, immediately after his marriage, he had made a will, in which he had left his entire property to his wife for her life, providing for its subsequent descent to his child or children.  It had never even occurred to his poor shattered brain that it would be well for him to alter his will.  Had he really believed that his wife had betrayed him, doubtless he would have done so.  He would have hated her, have distrusted her altogether, and have believed her to be an evil thing.  He had no such belief.  But in his desire to achieve empire, and in the sorrows which had come upon him in his unsuccessful struggle, his mind had wavered so frequently, that his spoken words were no true indicators of his thoughts; and in all his arguments he failed to express either his convictions or his desires.  When he would say something stronger than he intended, and it would be put to him by his wife, by her father or mother, or by some friend of hers, whether he did believe that she had been untrue to him, he would recoil from the answer which his heart would dictate, lest he should seem to make an acknowledgment that might weaken the ground upon which he stood.  Then he would satisfy his own conscience by assuring himself that he had never accused her of such sin.  She was still clinging to him now as his mind was working after this fashion.  ‘Louis,’ she said, ‘let it all be as though there had been nothing.’