Returning to the box-office, he asked for an outside stall, on the left, having calculated that from this seat he would have the best opportunity of watching the Moraines without being seen himself. Meanwhile the audience had again settled down and the curtain rose. Desforges did not leave the box. He kept his seat at the back, leaning forward to talk to Suzanne. But why not? Could not his presence be explained in a thousand ways without Suzanne having lied? Could not Moraines have invited him without his wife's knowledge? He spoke familiarly to the woman, it is true, and she answered him in a similar manner. But had not he, René, met him at her house? A gentleman is sitting down in a theatre talking to a lady he knows. Does that prove that there is a vile bond of sin existing between them? The poet argued in this fashion, and his arguments would have seemed to him irrefutable if he had seen on Suzanne's face a single one of those traits of melancholy he had expected to find. On the contrary, as she sat there in her elegant theatre-gown of black lace, with a little pink bonnet on her fair hair, eating, with dainty fingers, from the box of crystallised fruit that stood before her, she looked thoroughly happy, and as though she had not a care in the world. She laughed so heartily at the jokes in the piece, and her eyes were so bright and sparkling as she chatted with her two companions, that it seemed impossible to imagine she had only that morning paid a visit to the shrine of her most secret and heartfelt love. The emotions called forth by her meeting with her lover had left so few traces on her face, now beaming with pleasure, that René scarcely believed his own eyes. He had expected to find her so very different. The husband, too, with cordial joviality expressed in his manly features, seemed by no means the crabbed and suspicious recluse Suzanne had led her credulous lover to imagine. The unhappy fellow had come to the theatre to get rid of the pain which Colette's words had caused him, but when he reached home his distress had only increased. It has often been said that we should not keep many friends if we could hear those to whom we give that title speak of us behind our back. It is an even less satisfactory experiment to take by surprise the woman we love. René had just tried it, but he was too passionately fond of Suzanne to believe in this first vision of his Madonna's duplicity.