This _soiree_, and this treason and rupture at the end of a year, completely crushed Mme. Bourjot. She felt at first as if she had received a blow, and her life seemed to be ebbing away through the wound. She fancied she was really dying, and there was a certain sweetness in this thought. The following day she hoped Henri would come. She was vanquished and quite prepared to beg his pardon, to tell him that she had been in the wrong, to beg him to forgive her, to entreat him to be kind to her, and to allow her to gather up the crumbs of his love. She waited a week, but Henri did not come. She asked him for an interview that he might return her letters, and he sent them to her. She wrote and begged to see him for the last time that she might bid him farewell. Henri did not answer her letter, but, through his friends and through the newspaper and society gossip, he contrived to let Mme. Bourjot hear the rumour of an action that had been taken against him for one of his articles on the misery of the poor. For a whole week he managed to keep her mind occupied with the ideas of police and police courts, prison, and all that the dramatic imagination of a woman pictures to itself as the consequence of a lawsuit. When the Attorney-General assured Mme. Bourjot that the action would not be taken, she felt quite a coward after all the terror she had gone through, and weak and helpless from emotion, she could not endure any more, and so wrote in desperation to Henri: "To-morrow at two o'clock. If you are not there I shall wait on the staircase. I shall sit down on one of the stairs till you come." XXI Henri was ready, and had taken great pains to dress for the occasion in an apparently careless style. He was wearing one of those morning suits in which a young man nearly always looks well. At the time appointed in the letter there was a ring at the door. Henri opened it and Mme. Bourjot entered. She passed by and walked on in front of him as though she knew the way, until she reached the study. She took a seat on the divan, and neither of them spoke a word. There was plenty of room by her on the divan, but Henri drew up a smoking-chair, which he turned round, and, sitting down astride on it, folded his arms over the back. Mme. Bourjot lifted her double lace veil and turned it back over her hat. Holding her head slightly aside, and with one hand pulling the glove slowly off the other, she gazed at the things on the wall and on the mantel-shelf. She gave a little sigh as if she were alone, and then, glancing at Henri, she said: "There is some of my life here--something of me--in all that." She held out her ungloved hand to him, and Henri kissed the tips of her fingers respectfully.