The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of death upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things. "Victoire!" I said, "take care! You are no fool: you are something worse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my first wife--your blind hatred--has suggested to you odious, nay! criminal words." "Ah! Ah! Monsieur", she cried with wild energy. "After what I have just told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare." I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then, returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?" I asked. "If you had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?" She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur, it is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on the crucifix to keep that secret for ever." "Yet not with me, in fact,--not with me!" And I, in turn, questioned her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then stammered out, "True! not with you! because she believed, poor little soul! that..." "What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tell me!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is it possible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything--the precise moment?" For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past. Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we must pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in the very act, and did not credit her explanation. "When I surprised her," she goes on: