She did not say a word to him, and he, too, remained for a moment without speaking. Mechanically he sought with his eyes for the low arm-chair which he used formerly to wheel beside her, in order to talk the better with her. This arm-chair had disappeared, as well as the couch which formerly had stood crosswise at the corner of the fireplace. They had spent so many intimate evenings together, seated, she on the couch and he in the easy-chair! It was no doubt for the purpose of forgetting those scenes of tenderness that the deserted woman had banished these pieces of furniture from her home in this room. If he had known the true reason of the change! He seated himself on a chair beside her, and taking her hand said to her: "I have come to ask you to forgive me." She withdrew that little hand whose almost convulsive trembling he had felt. She looked at him with eyes of singular depth. The dark point of the pupil dilated strangely. Then in a low, almost stifled voice she replied: "It is not for me to forgive you. If you have made me unhappy, it was never your fault. Ah!" she went on, "I am greatly changed. I have been ill, very ill, but I wished for my son's sake, and for yours also, that you might not have that upon your conscience. I have thought so much of you, during so many feverish nights! No, it was not your fault if you were unable to believe me. Heavens! I have greatly pitied you!" He listened with infinite gratitude to these words of charity coming from lips from which his injustice had wrung so many sobs. For a moment this forgiveness coming to him from his victim melted to tenderness the weight of remorse, the alleviation of which he had so long sought in vain, and he said to her in tones of deep emotion: "What suffering I have caused you!" "Do not reproach yourself for it," she said, with that angelic mildness which caused in him so strange a feeling at once of sadness and of consolation--of sadness, for this mildness betokened so great a shattering, of consolation, for the balm of this pity penetrated to the most secret recesses of his wounded heart--"Yes," she went on, shaking her head, "it is this suffering that has saved me, and it is through it that I have judged my life. When we parted in the way you know, I returned here nearly mad, I had to take to my bed for many days, and unceasingly I found the eyes of the man I had deceived fixed upon me with devotion and sadness! By what I suffered, I understood the suffering that I had caused and the evil that I had spread around one. The shame into which I had fallen appeared to me, and in the presence of death I inwardly vowed to make every endeavour to become once more a virtuous woman." She paused; he saw clearly that she wished to speak to him of the other, to tell him that man had not been received at her house again; but was not her silence after the last sentence sufficiently eloquent?