And he entered into lengthened details respecting the delicacy of the feminine organisation, dwelling upon the contrast between the life to which his patient had been accustomed in the country and the life of Paris. Lacking in observation as Alfred might be, his habit of reasoning with precision forced him to recognise the vagueness of this talk, and he asked somewhat heedlessly: "And you have no observation to make to the husband?" "None," replied Louvet with a half smile, "unless it be to spoil our dear patient a good deal and to contradict her as little as possible." Alfred's heart sank within his breast, and while the liveried servant, who waited fashionably in the physician's ante-chamber, was assisting him to put on his overcoat, he was already being gnawed by this thought: "Helen has deceived me. It was not the doctor who ordered her to live apart from me. She has come to have a horror of me; but, what have I done to her?" What had he done to her? A deep melancholy took possession of him from the time of this visit to Louvet, of which he was very careful not to speak. What was the use of adding another pain to those which Helen already felt? For she suffered, as he could see--but why? Ingenuously he made it his study to find out the wrongs that he had done her. What frightened him most was that he could almost palpably feel the whole mystery in his wife's character. This is one of the most cruel trials that can come to a loving husband. When she was beside him, and alone with him, drawing out the stitches in her tapestry, he used to look at her and ask himself of what she was thinking. Of what? All his superiority of education availed him nothing in the presence of this silent creature whose mere presence troubled him in so obscure a fashion. The desire of her person, a desire the satisfaction of which he was incapable of demanding as a right, paralysed him with a sort of nervous suffering which, united to natural timidity and to the anxiety respecting this increasing paleness, was growing into a veritable torture. And then, when Armand arrived in the middle of such a silence, a comparison was inevitably instituted on Alfred's part between his friend's easy manners and his own constraint, and especially between the difficulty which he found in talking to Helen and the abundance of words that came to the Baron de Querne. Helen, too, appeared to make the same comparison, for in Armand's presence she took an interest at once in what was being said.