She urged at once her horse forward, leaving me crushed by this blow, the more terrible that I had wholly ceased to fear it, and that it struck me with a keen cruelty I had not even foreseen. There had indeed been in the unhappy woman's voice no trace whatever of insolent swaggering; it was the very voice of despair, a cry of heart-rending grief and timid reproach; everything that might add in my soul to the torture of a stained and shattered love, the disorder of a profound pity and an uneasy conscience. When I had found strength enough to look around me I was surprised at my own blindness. Among Madame de Palme's most assiduous courtiers, figures one Monsieur de Mauterne, whose antipathy for me, though confined within the limits of good-breeding, often seemed to me to assume an almost hostile tinge. Monsieur de Mauterne is a man of my age, tall, blonde, with a figure more robust than elegant, and features regularly handsome, but stiff and without expression. He possesses social accomplishments, much audacity, and no wit. His bearing and his conduct during the course of that fatal ride would have informed me from the start, if I had only thought of observing them, that he believed he had the right of fearing henceforth no rivalry near Madame de Palme. He assumed frankly the leading part in all the scenes in which she participated; he overwhelmed her with attentions, affected to speak to her in a whisper, and neglected nothing, in a word, to initiate the public into the secret of his success. In that respect, he lost his trouble; the world, after exhausting its wickedness upon imaginary errors, seems thus far to refuse the evidence which vainly stares it in the face.