“Do not speak like that,” she interrupted, freeing her hand as she drew back with almost hateful aversion, “or else I shall think you are in the plot to lie to me. No. This man deceives you as he has me. You believe in him as I have done. He would be ashamed to show himself in his true colours before the honourable man you are. Listen.” She seized my arm again and came so near me that I could feel the feverish heat of her rapid breath. “Do you know where I, Camille Favier, have come from; I, the recognized mistress of Jacques? I have come from a chamber where that wretch, Madam de Bonnivet, has given herself to him, where the bed is still in disorder and warm from their two bodies. Oh, what a hideous thing it is!” “Impossible!” I murmured, overwhelmed with fright at the words I had just listened to and the tone in which they were spoken. “You have been the dupe of an anonymous letter or a fancied resemblance.” “Listen again,” she went on almost tragically, and her fingers bit into my flesh, so furious was their grasp. “For a week I have had no doubt as to the relations between Jacques and this woman. Suddenly he had become tender to me with that tenderness which a mistress never mistakes. He was humouring me. There was a certain expression in his eyes when he looked at me. I would have liked to snatch away that look to read what was behind it. Then I found around his eyes that voluptuous hollow I knew in him too well. I recognized in his whole being that exhausted languor which he used to have in the days gone by when we loved passionately, and he avoided our appointments. He always had an excuse to change and postpone them. You see, I am talking to you as I feel. It is brutal, but what I am telling you is true, as I have always told the truth to him and to you. It was I, you understand, who asked for these appointments, I who did the hunting, while he refused me and escaped from me. Is any other proof of a lover’s deception necessary? But this week I began again to doubt. I received a visit from this woman’s husband. She had the audacity to send him to me! He came with Senneterre to ask me to act at a grand affair they are having next Monday.” “I have an invitation to it,” I interrupted, suddenly recollecting that I had received an invitation for it. “I was astonished at it, but I understand now. It was an account of you.”