With her trembling hands, which had hardly strength enough to lift up the sheets of paper upon which she had arranged the damning fragments with such patience, she showed Pierre all the beginnings of a letter, among them the irrefutable sentence that had another significance for him. He was trembling so violently, his features expressed such anguish, that Berthe was convinced of his complicity. This fresh proof, after so many, that her suspicions were well founded, was so painful to the poor woman that before Pierre's eyes she gave way to a fit of hysterics. She made a sign to show that her breath was failing her. Her heart beat so furiously that she felt she was suffocating. She pressed her hand upon her heart, sobbing, "Oh, God!"--Her voice died away in her throat, and she fell upon the floor, her head hanging loosely, her eyes gleaming whitely, and with a little foam at the corners of her mouth as though she were dying. The young man recovered his senses before the necessity of helping the poor woman, whose anguish terrified him, of succoring her by the simplest means that could be imagined readily, of summoning the chambermaid, of sending for the doctor and of awaiting his diagnosis. These cares carried him through the frightful half hour that follows every such revelation, the half hour that is so terrible. He only recovered consciousness of the reality of his own misfortune when the departure of the doctor had reassured him of the young woman's state. The physician recommended antispasmodics and promised to come again during the evening. Although he did not seem much alarmed, the young wife's illness was serious enough to demand the presence of the husband. Hautefeuille said, "I am going for M. du Prat," and went off in the direction of the Villa Helmholtz. It was on the way, while his carriage was rolling along the road now so familiar to him, that he felt the first attack of real despair. The news he had just heard was so stunning, so unexpected, so disconcerting, and full of anguish for him that he felt as though in the grasp of some hideous nightmare.--He would awake presently and would find everything as it was only that morning.--But no.--Berthe's words suddenly recurred to him. He saw again in imagination the opening of the letter, written in the hand he had known for twenty years: "Some vengeances are infamous, my dear Ely, and the one you have conceived--"