“Madam, you have deceived me.  I don’t know you.  Perhaps you entered the wrong door.  I suppose your husband and your children are waiting for you.  Please, my servant will take you down to the carriage.”

Could I think that these words, uttered in the same stern and cold voice, would have such a strange effect upon the woman’s heart?  With a cry, all the bitter passion of which I could not describe, she threw herself before me on her knees, exclaiming: 

“So you do love me!”

Forgetting that our life had already been lived, that we were old, that all had been ruined and scattered like dust by Time, and that it can never return again; forgetting that I was grey, that my shoulders were bent, that the voice of passion sounds strangely when it comes from old lips—­I burst into impetuous reproaches and complaints.

“Yes, I did deceive you!” her deathly pale lips uttered.  “I knew that you were innocent—­”

“Be silent.  Be silent.”

“Everybody laughed at me—­even your friends, your mother whom I despised for it—­all betrayed you.  Only I kept repeating:  ’He is innocent!’”

Oh, if this woman knew what she was doing to me with her words!  If the trumpet of the angel, announcing the day of judgment, had resounded at my very ear, I would not have been so frightened as now.  What is the blaring of a trumpet calling to battle and struggle to the ear of the brave?  It was as if an abyss had opened at my feet.  It was as if an abyss had opened before me, and as though blinded by lightning, as though dazed by a blow, I shouted in an outburst of wild and strange ecstasy: 

“Be silent!  I—­”

If that woman were sent by God, she would have become silent.  If she were sent by the devil, she would have become silent even then.  But there was neither God nor devil in her, and interrupting me, not permitting me to finish the phrase, she went on: 

“No, I will not be silent.  I must tell you all.  I have waited for you so many years.  Listen, listen!”

But suddenly she saw my face and she retreated, seized with horror.

“What is it?  What is the matter with you?  Why do you laugh?  I am afraid of your laughter!  Stop laughing!  Don’t!  Don’t!”

But I was not laughing at all, I only smiled softly.  And then I said very seriously, without smiling: 

“I am smiling because I am glad to see you.  Tell me about yourself.”

And, as in a dream, I saw her face and I heard her soft terrible whisper: 

“You know that I love you.  You know that all my life I loved you alone.  I lived with another and was faithful to him.  I have children, but you know they are all strangers to me—­he and the children and I myself.  Yes, I deceived you, I am a criminal, but I do not know how it happened.  He was so kind to me, he made me believe that he was convinced of your innocence—­later I learned that he did not tell the truth, and with this, just think of it, with this he won me.”