"Forgive that woman? Never! never! I cannot." An almost insignificant detail--are there any insignificant details in such crises?--completed the tension of her nerves. Toward nine o'clock her husband, ready dressed for going out, entered her room. He had a letter in his hand slipped between his gloves and his hat. Berthe could not read the address on the envelope, but she saw that it bore no stamp. With her heart beating wildly with expectation of the reply he would make to the simple question, she said to her husband:-- "Do you want a stamp?--You will find one in my writing case on the table." "No, thank you," replied Olivier. "It is simply a line to be delivered by hand. I will leave it myself." He went out, adding that he would be back for luncheon. He never dreamed that his wife burst into a passion of weeping the moment she was alone. She was now certain the letter was for the Baroness Ely. Then, like every jealous woman, she gave way to the irresistible, savage instinct of material research which mitigates nothing, satisfies nothing--for, suppose a proof of the justice of suspicion is discovered, does that make the jealous suffering inspired by that suspicion any easier to bear? She went into her husband's room. In the wastepaper basket she saw the fragments of a score of letters, thrown there by the feverish hand of the young man. They were the drafts of the letters she had heard him begin and crumple up and destroy the night before. With trembling hands and burning cheeks, her throat parched with the horror of what she was doing, she gathered together and rearranged. She thus reconstituted the beginnings of a score of letters, letters of the most utter insignificance to any one unaided by the intuition of wounded love, but terribly, frightfully clear and precise to her. They were all addressed to a woman. Berthe could read the incoherence of Olivier's thoughts in them. The entire gamut of sentiment was gone through, by turn ceremonious: "Madame, will you allow a visitor who has not yet had the honor;" ironical, "You will not be surprised, madame, that I cannot leave Cannes;" familiar, "I reproach myself, dear madame, for not having called upon you before this." How the young man's pen had hesitated over the form of asking such a simple thing--the permission to pay a visit! This hesitation was, in itself, the certain proof of a mystery, and one of the fragments thus put together again revealed its nature: "Some vengeances are infamous, my dear Ely, and the one you have conceived--"