How should she ever accustom her heart to the iniquity of this same being whom she had so greatly loved. He had parted from her abruptly, and unworthily, but the recognition of the extent of her love for him would not have caused her so much suffering as she had endured. The martyrdom, the intolerable martyrdom consisted in the impotence of her love, not to command a return, but to make itself merely understood. She was like one under sentence of death who is willing indeed to die, but whose worst agony is the powerlessness to exclaim before death: "I am innocent." How keenly he had made her feel the arrogant outrage inflicted by his honour as a man, for it was in the name of this honour that he had sacrificed her. Ah! had he loved her, how lightly he would have held this honour, just as she had lightly held her own; but how could he have loved her since from the very first he had believed her guilty of deception? She used to come and say to him: "I have kept myself for you," and he used to say to himself: "After Monsieur de Varades!" All the proofs of her affection--and how she had lavished them upon him!--had been shattered against this invincible conviction, and yet, heavens! her affection was real, as real as the life which had begun only on the day when she had come to know him. And she could hear his voice saying: "We were both persons of experience. Do you believe that I was not acquainted with your life?" Oh! what injustice, what hideous injustice! She sobbed her heart out at the thought of it. She came and went, a prey to continual fever, finding no more rest for her poor burning head than for her poor bleeding heart, and inwardly given over to a medley of emotions--despair for happiness that was lost for ever, keen regret for her absent lover, frenzy at having been misunderstood in the noblest and most genuine of her feelings. To repent of having belonged to this cruel Armand before the hour of her supreme deception, was what she could not do. Love, sublime love had impelled her to the act, as sublime as itself. Sublime love! "No," she now exclaimed, "blind, insensate love!" And she walked to and fro, at random, in her room like a caged animal, and ever, as against an irrefragable wall, she struck against this thought: "What was the use of having loved like that? What was the use? Ah! the lying, lying, lying!--" What served to complete her provocation in the mortal crisis through which she was passing was the tender and untimely solicitude of her husband. As he had no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in this distempered soul, he would chance to say to her, in the belief that he was holding out an agreeable prospect: "We will make a trip as soon as I am free. Perhaps Armand will come with us." Or perhaps: "I am surprised at not having heard from Armand. Has he not written to you?" "No," she would reply.