She ceased speaking, and fell into her chair with her head resting on the back, as though exhausted by the effort of laying bare her thoughts, in which were mingled so many sad and bitter memories. She waited Olivier's reply with an anxiety so intense that her strength seemed to be ebbing away, and she closed her eyes as in dread. With the logic of a woman deeply in love, she had forced the man who had come there to threaten and insult her into a position where he must take one of the two courses that their wretched situation left open to him,--either to tell all to Hautefeuille, who would then decide for himself whether he loved Ely enough to trust her after he knew that she had been his friend's mistress; or, to spare him this torture, to leave Hautefeuille in ignorance with his happiness. In this latter case Olivier would have to go away, to put an end forever to his own misery, and to cease inflicting the pain of his presence upon Ely, a pain that, in itself, was the cause of a nervous state sufficient to reveal sooner or later their past relations. What would he do? He did not reply; he, who only a few minutes before had been so eager to speak, so bitter in his reproaches. Through her half-closed eyes, quivering with the intensity of her anxiety to know the worst, Ely saw that he was regarding her with a strange, impassioned look. A struggle was going on within him. What was its cause? What would be its result? She was about to learn, and also what sort of a sentiment her heartbreaking appeal had awakened in the heart that had never been able to tear itself away from her entirely. "You love him?" he said at last. "You love him?--But, why do I ask? I know you love him. I feel it, I see it.--It is only love that could have prompted such words--could have imprinted such an accent, such truth upon them.--Oh!" he went on bitterly, "if you had only been, when we were in Rome, what you are now; if only once I had felt that you vibrated with genuine emotion!--But you did not love me and you love him!" He repeated, "You love him!--I thought we had inflicted upon each other all the pain that is in a human being's power, and that I could never suffer any more than I did in Rome, than I have done during these past days when I felt that you were his mistress.--But beside this--that you love him--my sufferings were nothing.--And yet how could you help loving him?--How was it that I did not understand at once that you would be touched, penetrated, changed; that your heart would be imbued with the charm of his grace, of his youth, of his delicacy, of all that makes him what he is?--Ah! I see you now as I longed to see you once, as I despaired of ever seeing you, and it is through him, it is for him!" Then, with a moan as of some stricken animal, he cried:-- "No! I cannot support it. I suffer too much, I suffer too much!" And words of grief, mingled with words of rage and love, poured forth in a wild stream.