All the future of their friendship was at stake in this moment, and yet he remained there motionless, letting time slip by that was priceless. A few minutes before, when they were in the carriage returning to the hotel, he could not say a single word to Pierre. Now he must at all costs defend this beloved, noble sentiment, take part in the struggle of which the heart of his friend, so cruelly wounded, was the scene. How would he receive him? What could they say to each other? Olivier did not ask. The instinct that made him leave his room to go down to Hautefeuille's was as unconscious, as irreflective, as his wife's appeal to Hautefeuille had been, that appeal which had ruined all. Would Olivier's advances be followed with as fatal results? When he had passed the threshold of the room, he saw Pierre sitting before a table, his head resting on his hands. A sheet of paper before him, still blank, showed that he had intended to write a letter, but had not been able. The pen had slipped from his fingers upon the paper and he had left it there. Through the window beyond this living statue of despair Olivier saw the wonderful afternoon sky, a soft pile of delicate hues in which the blue was deepened into mauve. Glorious masses of mimosa filled the vases and filled with their refreshing and yet heavy perfume the retreat in which the young lover had revelled during the winter in hours of romantic reverie, in which he was now draining the vast cup of bitterness that the eternal Delilah fills for her dearest victims! Olivier had suffered many a poignant shock during this tragic afternoon, but none more agonizing than the silent spectacle of this deep, endless suffering. All the virility of his friendship awoke and his own grief melted in a fathomless tenderness for the companion of his childhood and youth, who was dying before his eyes. He put his hand upon Pierre's shoulder, gently and lightly, as though he divined that at his contact the jealous body of the lover must rebel and shrink back in horror, in aversion. "It is I," he said; "it is I, Olivier.--You must feel that we cannot remain with this weight upon our hearts. It is a load under which you are reeling and which is stifling me. You are suffering; I am also in torture. Our pain will be less if we bear it together, each supporting the other.--I owe you an explanation, and I have come to give it you. Between us there can be no secret now. Madame de Carlsberg has told me all." Hautefeuille did not appear to have heard the first words his friend uttered. But at the sound of his mistress's name he raised his head. His features were horribly contracted, betraying the dreadful suffering of a grief that has not found relief in tears. He replied in a dry voice in which all his repulsion was manifest.