What, however, was the matter with Helen, for she was not the same? He had begun by believing her seriously ill, after the visit to the doctor, which had passed off as Helen had foreseen. He had accompanied her, had waited in the drawing-room of the celebrated practitioner, who was a friend of Armand's, and had afterwards been too modest to ask her for any details. He was one of those men who shroud the feminine nature in a deep veneration, to whom the matters relating to the sex are confined within inaccessible mystery, who have never looked upon complete nakedness. Let him who will reconcile women's pretensions to refinement with the profound contempt which most of them feel for such men, while the purest have in them a slight weakness towards the wicked fellow who has seen and done everything. Everything? They do not know what this is, and they dream about it. Although deeply in love with Helen in the physical meaning of the term, Alfred had found a species of pleasure in sacrificing to the requirements of a health so dear, pleasures which she had never shared; but having scarcely any points of comparison, he had come to dream no more. Yes, this renunciation was sweet to him--sweet and yet useless, since Helen's countenance was shadowed every day, and she was evidently suffering. When Alfred saw her absorbed in indefinite silence, when he was aware of the thinness and paleness of the cheeks that he had known so full and rosy, he gave way to unexpressed pity. "What is the matter with her?" he would then ask himself. "What if she is in serious danger, and dares not tell me, that she may not make me anxious?" The result of these reflections was that his ingenuousness and trustfulness prompted him to venture upon exactly the same procedure that would have been dictated to him by suspicion. Helen had thought it necessary to speak to him on several occasions of fresh visits to the doctor, in order to avoid further attempts at intimacy. "Well," said Chazel to himself, "I will go to the doctor;" and one afternoon towards the end of that winter he again found himself, this time alone, in the waiting-room, an apartment furnished like a museum with that wealth of knick-knacks which is characteristic of modern interiors.