Facing the bar ran an empty bench, and on a long wooden table lay an English newspaper in several sheets. Here Hubert sat down and ordered a glass of port wine, which he drank mechanically and which had the effect of freshly exciting his strained nerves. The vision came back to him a third time, accompanied by a still greater number of ideas, which automatically grouped themselves into a single body of argument. Theresa had then returned to Paris so speedily, and had repaired to one of their clandestine meetings. But why had she had such a violent fit of sobbing in his very arms? She was often melancholy in her voluptuousness. The intoxications of love usually ended with her in sad emotion. But how far removed was this frenzy of despair from her habitual, dreamy languor! Hubert had been almost frightened at it, and then she had answered him: "It was so long since I had tasted your kisses! They are so sweet to me that they pain me. But it is a dear pain," she had added, drawing him to her heart and cradling him in her arms. Nevertheless her despair had not entirely disappeared on the following day or during the weeks which ensued, and which she had spent in the neighbourhood of Paris at a country house belonging to one of her friends who was acquainted with Hubert. He had gone there to see her and had found her as silent as ever, and at times almost dull. She had returned to Paris in the same condition, and with her face somewhat altered; but he had attributed the change to physical uneasiness. A sudden and new association of ideas now caused him to say to himself: "What if this were remorse? Remorse for what? Why, for her infamy!" He got up, went out of the café, resumed his walk, and shook off this frightful hypothesis. "Fool that I am," he thought, "if she had deceived me it would have been because she did not love me, and what motive would she then have to lie to me?" This objection, which appeared irrefutable to him, drove away the suspicion for a few minutes. Then it came back again as it always does: "But who is this Count de la Croix-Firmin? Has she ever spoken of him to me?" he asked himself. He searched anxiously through all his recollections, but could not find that this name had ever been uttered by her. Still, if-- Suddenly in a hidden corner of his memory he perceived the syllables of the already hateful name. He had seen them printed in a newspaper article on the festivities at Trouville. It was certainly in a Boulevard paper, and in a connection in which he had also remarked his mistress's name. By what chance did this little fact, in itself insignificant, return to torment him at this moment?