He picked it up and smoothed it out; there was something in it--a bit of crumpled paper over whose ruffled surface ran the words of love and the appeal which had brought him to his last rendezvous. He could not believe his eyes! This was his wife’s glove! It meant, then, that she had found the letter which he had evidently carelessly let fall, and she had read the ridiculous sheet of paper whose words and expressions gave him now a sort of wearied nausea. She had come to the studio to confirm her doubts, she had seen them enter together, of course. She knew everything, then, everything--everything except that it was over--all that should never have been was ended. But that would not clear him in her eyes. Much disturbed and sick at heart, he went out into the streets and walked slowly along, somewhat like a man in a dream, lighting one cigarette after another, following, as it were, the leading of the tiny light that faded and glowed at the end of the paper cylinder. He walked on until the small house in which he lived near the Avenue du Bois was not more than fifteen minutes distant, then he wandered away from it, his thoughts following an irregular route. * * * * * As Mrs. Evremond got into her cab without giving an address, the coachman waited for a second, then leaned down from his box and asked her where he should drive her. Home--she had none! Why, the term was a farce! It had meant a place shared by her husband and herself--he had dishonored it, blighted it forever in her eyes. She would go at once to her mother’s, and from there write him her conditions--they were hers to make, she knew--he would not put forth any plea; she would never see him again. She gave the coachman an address in Passy, and the speaking of the number and street out into the dark put finality to what she did. He received it with a “_Bien, madame_,” as casual and cheerful as if she had given him a point of happy meeting instead of neutral ground on which to decide for misery. She sank back in the _fiacre_, white and shaking, and watched the lights of the interminable streets mark her as she passed, and the unconcerned passersby, whom she envied in their apparent freedom from an hour of agony. She had been betrayed; horribly, cruelly, disloyally left for another woman. At first the jealous bitterness of it obscured all other feeling. She was only conscious of a desire to escape--to put miles between herself and her husband and to be free. He had then not loved her for long, and she had believed herself cherished. Now she believed she had only been uneasily watched. No doubt, even the few occasions on which he had showed her marked affection--notably after some unintended indifference on her part--were to be attributed to his uneasiness, to the assuaging of his conscience. That to such caresses she had been dupe was a fatal obstacle to any reconciliation.