How tenderly René had kissed her for those words, in which the author could read a tribute of devotion paid to his future work and the lover a delicate expression of secret jealousy. He asked a little timidly, 'Mayn't I come even to your house?' 'To mine least of all,' she replied. 'I could not bear to see you touch my husband's hand now. You know what I mean,' she added, passing her fingers caressingly through his hair. He was sitting at her feet, while she was still in the arm-chair. She bent forward and hid her face on René's shoulder. 'Don't make me say any more,' she sighed; then, after a few minutes, 'What I should like to be to you is the friend who only enters into a man's life to bring him the sweet and noble gifts of joy and courage, the friend who loves and is beloved in secret, away from the mocking world that sneers at the purest feelings of the soul. I have committed a great sin as it is'--here she hid her face in her pretty hands--'do not let it grow into that series of base and sordid acts which fills me with such horror in others. Spare me this, René, if you love me as you say you do . . . But tell me, do you really love me so much?' In delivering herself of this pretty batch of lies she had seen in the face of her simple and romantic victim the rapturous joy with which these beautiful sentiments inspired him. The Madonna resumed the halo which she had temporarily laid aside. Then, by a skilful combination of ruse and affection, by giving to cool calculation an appearance of tenderest susceptibility, she had led him to agree to the following convention as being the only one befitting the poetry of her love. He was to look out for a small suite of rooms somewhere not very far from the Rue Murillo; he would engage them in an assumed name, and they could meet there two, three, or four times a week. She had suggested Batignolles, but it was so cleverly done that he almost imagined he had hit upon it himself, as indeed upon the rest of _her_ ideas. He was to start out the very next day, and then write to her, _poste restante_, in certain initials, at a certain office. All these unnecessary precautions gave René an idea of the state of slavery in which his poor angel lived--if such an existence could be called living! 'Poor angel' he had called her, as she gave utterance to a half-stifled complaint concerning her husband's despotism and compared herself to a hunted animal, 'how you must have suffered!' And she had lifted her eyes to the ceiling with such a well-feigned expression of grief that, years afterwards, the man for whose benefit all this was done still asked, 'Was she not sincere?'