"At last!" she sighed, when she found herself alone in the little drawing-room, Alfred having left for his office, and Henry for his walk; and the distresses of the morning were succeeded by a delicious feeling of relief. Already even, in her drawing-room, which was filled with recollections of Armand, she was surrendered unreservedly to her love. The recovery of her freedom overwhelmed her with joy such as the vision of the future could no longer take from before her mind. She evoked in thought her lover's gaze, she kindled in it that gleam of felicity which was as the stars towards which her being was uplifted. "I am sacrificing everything for him," she thought to herself, returning for a moment to the impressions of that painful morning; "but the more I sacrifice for him the more will he feel how much I love him. And how I love him! how I love him!" she repeated aloud in exultation. She looked at her watch. "It is past one o'clock. He is to wait for me from twelve. What a surprise for him if I arrive so soon. For he does not expect me immediately." And she hastened to put on her hat, taking a thick veil with her at the bottom of her pocket to put over her face in the cab. He had the day before recommended her to do so. And now she was already passing down the Rue Saint-Lazare, like one walking in her sleep, not daring to look at anything around her. It seemed to her that everyone could see by her figure and gait where she was going, and her elation had given place to a sort of terror--but a resolute terror, like that of a man of courage when on the way to fight his first duel--when she ventured to hail a cab in the Place de la Trinité. "The Rue de Stockholm," she said. "What number?" asked the man. "I will tell you when to stop," she replied. To get out of the cab in front of the house had just appeared to her suddenly as an impossibility. Her hands shook when she fastened on her double veil in the vehicle, which began to move forward, heavy and slow; at least it seemed to her that every revolution of the wheels lasted a minute. She looked at the shops in the Rue Saint-Lazare, as they filed past, then at the courtyard in front of the terminus, and the sight of a traveller paying his cabman set her searching in her muff in agony. What if she had forgotten her purse? No, she had forty francs, in small ten-franc pieces. So much the worse; she would give one to the man, for to wait for the change on the footpath would be too much for her. All these emotions were painful to her feelings. She would willingly have fixed her imagination upon her lover--her lover, for she was going to be his mistress. How contemptuous the tones of her friends at Bourges used formerly to become when uttering these words in reference to some compromised woman! Then her nervous emotion proved the stronger. "If only he does not guess what it has cost me! Ah, may my cowardly fears not spoil his happiness!"