“Mademoiselle Favier!” he cried. Then he stopped, quite out of countenance, while Camille in terror cowered against Molan who had by this time also got out of the cab, and who, as if surprised at recognizing the man who had rushed toward his mistress, cried in a voice in which there was a tremor— “Why, it is M. de Bonnivet!” “Good gracious, mademoiselle,” Queen Anne’s husband stammered after a moment’s dead silence, “I must have seemed very strange to you just now, but I thought I recognized some one else.” In his hesitation a sudden, immense and unhoped-for joy quivered. The jealous husband had a proof that his suspicions were false. “I thought I recognized the friend of a friend of mine, and in Molan the friend himself. You will excuse me, will you not? What would have been a joke to her becomes to a person like yourself, whom I admire so much, and with whom I am so little acquainted, an unpardonable familiarity.” “You are quite forgiven,” said Camille with a laugh, adding with as much presence of mind as if she had pronounced the phrase on the Vaudeville stage in the course of an imaginary crisis, instead of finding herself face to face with a real danger: “I live quite close here. I asked the famous author to see me home after rehearsal, and I had scruples about letting him return alone and on foot to civilization. I am going to get into my cab and leave you my cavalier to accompany you, M. de Bonnivet. Molan will explain to you that a woman can be an actress and a simple ordinary woman as well, very simple and very ordinary. Good-bye, Molan; good-bye, sir.” She bowed her pretty head coquettishly, enveloping the two men in her lovely smile, and made towards the left side of the church where the sacristy was, while Jacques said to Bonnivet putting his finger to his lips— “Because of her mother, you know.” “I understand, you bad boy,” the other man replied with a hearty laugh. He continued to feel that gaiety of deliverance, so sweet as to be almost intoxicating, on emerging from a torturing crisis like the one he had just been through. He could have kissed where he stood the lover of his wife, whom he had all day been planning to kill, and he pushed him into his carriage, which was splashed with mud right up to the box through this fierce pursuit across Paris, saying as he did so: “Where shall I drop you? You know your Mademoiselle Favier is quite charming, with such distinction of manner too! She had such a way, too, of justifying her drive with you! Mind, I am asking no questions. I will apologize again to her when she is acting at my house. You might do so, too, for me, if you don’t mind! A likeness, you know, and at that hour a mistake is so easily made.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX