He left the salon before he had finished speaking. The young woman remained with her forehead resting upon her hand in the same attitude. Her cheeks were burning, and although she was not weeping, her heart was swollen with grief, and her breathing was agitated and hurried. She became another woman with Olivier absent. Apart from him she could abandon herself completely to the strange sentiment that her husband inspired in her. She felt a sort of wounded and unrequited affection for him. Her feelings could not seek relief either in reproaches or in caresses. They were, therefore, in a constant state of mute irritation. Under such moral conditions Olivier's visibly partial affection for Pierre could not be very sympathetic to the young woman, particularly since their return to Cannes, which had delayed their return just at the moment she was longing to see her family again. But there was another reason that caused her to detest this friendship. Like all young women who marry into a different circle from their own, she was mortally anxious about her husband's past. Olivier, in one of those half-confidences that even the most self-contained men fall into in the moment of candor following marriage, had allowed her to see that he had suffered a particularly cruel disillusion in the latter part of his bachelor life. Another half-confidence had enabled her to learn that this incident had taken place at Rome, and that the cause of it was a foreigner of noble birth. Olivier had completely forgotten these two imprudent phrases, but Berthe treasured them in the recesses of her memory. She had even not been content to brood over the avowals; she had put them side by side, and had completed them by that species of mental mosaic work in which women excel, seizing a detail here, another there, in the most insignificant conversation to add them to the story upon which they are at work. They make deductions in this way that the most scientific observers, the most wily detectives, cannot equal.