"You came in at twenty-five minutes past one. It was Ligny who saw you home, I know it. He brought you back in a cab, I heard it stop outside the house." As she did not reply, he continued: "Deny it, if you can!" She remained silent, and he repeated, in an urgent, almost appealing tone: "Tell me he didn't!" Had she been so inclined, she might, with a phrase, with a single word, with a tiny movement of head or shoulders, have rendered him perfectly submissive, and almost happy. But she maintained a malicious silence. With compressed lips and a far-off look in her eyes, she seemed as though lost in a dream. He sighed hoarsely. "Fool that I was, I didn't think of that! I told myself you would come home, as on other nights, with Madame Doulce, or else alone. If I had only known that you were going to let that fellow see you home!" "Well, what would you have done, had you known it?" "I should have followed you, by God!" She stared at him with hard, unnaturally bright eyes. "That I forbid you to do! Understand me! If I learn that you have followed me, even once, I'll never see you again. To begin with, you haven't the right to follow me. I suppose I am free to do as I like." Choking with astonishment and anger, he stammered: "Haven't the right to? Haven't the right to? You tell me I haven't the right?" "No, you haven't the right! Moreover, I won't have it." Her face assumed an expression of disgust. "It's a mean trick to spy on a woman, if you once try to find out where I'm going, I'll send you about your business, and quickly at that." "Then," he murmured, thunderstruck, "we are nothing to each other, I am nothing to you. We have never belonged to each other. But see, Felicie, remember----" But she was losing patience: "Well, what do you want me to remember?" "Felicie, remember that you gave yourself to me!" "My dear boy, you really can't expect me to think of that all day. It wouldn't be proper." He looked at her for a while, more in curiosity than in anger, and said to her, half bitterly, half gently: "They may well call you a selfish little jade! Be one, Felicie, be one, as much as you like! What does it matter, since I love you? You are mine; I am going to take you back; I am going to take you back, and keep you. Think! I can't go on suffering for ever, like a poor dumb beast. Listen. I'll start with a clean slate. Let us begin to love one another over again. And this time it will be all right. And you'll be mine for good, mine only. I am an honest man; you know that. You can depend on me. I'll marry you as soon as I've got a position." She gazed at him with disdainful surprise. He believed that she had doubts as to his dramatic future, and, in order to banish them, he said, erect on his long legs: