gallery that led into the garden; and she did see them, on the path,--she saw them bending towards each other, exchanging kisses as they walked. But the pain of this was nothing to what followed. When Annette, sitting in the dark after having gone up to her room, saw Sylvie come in, all animation, and when Sylvie exclaimed at finding her alone in the darkness, kissed her cheek, and showed a thousand and one signs of usual affection; when Annette, after giving the excuse of a sudden headache that had obliged her to retire, asked Sylvie how she had spent the rest of the evening and if she had gone walking with Tullio, Sylvie ingenuously replied that she had not gone walking and that she did not know what had become of Tullio; that besides Tullio was beginning to bore her, and then she didn't like men who were too handsome, and besides he was foppish, and he was a little too dark. . . . Upon which she went to bed, humming a waltz. Annette did not sleep. Sylvie slept soundly; she had no suspicion of the tempest she had unchained. . . . Annette was the prey of unleashed demons. What had happened was a catastrophe, a double catastrophe. Sylvie was her rival, and Sylvie was lying to her. Sylvie, her beloved! Sylvie, her joy and her faith! . . . Everything was crumbling. She could no longer love her. No longer love her? Could she, could she no longer love her? . . . Oh, how deep-rooted that love was, so much more so than she had thought! . . . But is it possible to love someone whom one distrusts? Oh! Sylvie's treachery wouldn't be anything. . . . There was something else. It was. . . . It was. . . . Go ahead, say what it was! . . . Yes, it was that man, whom Annette did not respect, whom she did not love, and whom she loved now. . . . Loved? No! . . . Whom she _wanted_. A fever of jealous pride demanded that she take him, that she tear him away from the _other_; and, above all, that the other should not tear him away from her. . . . ("_The other_" that was what Sylvie had become for Annette! . . .) That night she did not rest a single hour. The sheets burned her skin. And from the neighboring bed there rose the light breathing of the sleep of innocence. When they found themselves face to face the next morning, Sylvie saw at a glance that everything had changed; and she did not understand what had happened. Annette, with circles under her eyes, pale, hard and haughty, but strangely more beautiful (at once more beautiful and more homely, as though all her secret forces had arisen in answer to a summons)--Annette, helmeted in pride, cold, hostile, with a wall about her, looked at Sylvie and listened while she chattered as usual, then scarcely said good-morning, and left the room. . . . Sylvie's babble stopped in the middle of a word. She too went out, and with her eyes followed Annette who was descending the stairs. . . .