When Pierre Hautefeuille had left Ely that night, she felt very cruelly the impression that a struggle was inevitable and that it was not only a struggle with a man, but with destiny! As long as her lover remained near, her tense nerves dominated this impression, but when he had gone she gave herself up to its contemplation. Alone, without sufficient strength to go to her bed, she crouched, thoroughly unnerved, upon a sofa. She began to weep, a crisis that lasted indefinitely, as though she felt herself trapped, threatened, conquered in advance! Her last hope had just been shattered. She could no longer doubt, after the scene that Pierre had told her of, that Olivier knew all. Yes, he knew all. And his nervousness, his fits of anger, his laughter, his despair, proved only too clearly that he would not accept the situation, and that a tempest of ungovernable desires were unchained within him. Now that he had arrived at such a point of exasperation and of knowledge, what was he going to do? In the first place, he would try to meet her again. She felt as certain of this as though he had been standing there before her laughing the cruel laugh that had wounded Hautefeuille's heart. In a few days--perhaps in a few hours--she would be in the presence of her mortal enemy, an enemy not only of herself but of her love. He would be there; she would see him, hear him moving, breathing, living! A shudder of horror ran through her frame at the idea. The thought that this man had once possessed her filled her with a kind of acute suffering that made her heart almost stop beating. The remembrance of caresses given and returned induced a feeling of nausea and crushed her with shameful distress. She had never felt so much as at this minute how her sincere, deep love had really changed her, had made of her another woman, a rejuvenated, forgiven, renewed creature!--But it could not be helped. She would accept, she would support the odious presence of her former lover. It would be the punishment for not having awaited her love of the present in perfect purity; for not having foreseen that one day she would meet Hautefeuille; for not having lived worthy of his love. She had arrived at that religion--she, the reasoner, the nihilist, atheist, had come to accept the mysticism of her happiness so natural to the woman truly in love, and which makes all previous emotions not provoked by the loved one a sort of blasphemous sacrilege. She would expiate the blasphemy by supporting his odious presence.--Alas! Olivier would not be content with simply inflicting the horror of his presence on her. He would speak with her. What would he say? What would he want? What would he ask?--She did not deceive herself for a moment. The sentiments of this man as regarded herself had not changed. As Hautefeuille had told her of the incident in his room, she had again heard his laugh, cruel and agonizing and insulting, that she knew so well. And with this laugh