he would portray money in it as a festering sore eating away modern society. Pauline did not distress herself much about this new failure, which she had already inferred from Lazare's embarrassed expressions in his last letters. What grieved her most was the gradually increasing misunderstanding between her cousin and his wife. She strove to find out the real cause of it, how it happened that those young people of ample means and with nothing to do but to be happy had so quickly reached discomfort. She returned to the subject again, and only ceased to question her cousin about it when she saw the embarrassment she was causing him. He stammered and grew pale, and turned his face away from her as she interrogated him. She well knew that expression of shame and fear, that terror of the idea of death, which he had formerly struggled to conceal as though it were some disgraceful disease; but could it be possible, she asked herself, that the cold shadow of nothingness had already fallen between the young couple so soon after their nuptials? For several days she lingered in a state of doubt, and then, without any further confession from him on the subject, she one evening read the truth in his eyes as he rushed downstairs from his room in the dark, as though he were pursued by ghosts. In Paris, amidst his love-fever, Lazare had at first forgotten all about death. He had found a refuge in Louise's embraces. But satiety came at last, and then in that wife of his, for whom life centred in caressing endearments, he found no sustaining, no courage-prompting influence whatever. Passion was fugitive and deceitful--powerless, he found, to give a semblance of happiness to life. One night he awoke with a start, chilled by an icy breath that made his hair stand on end. He shivered and wailed out his cry of bitter anguish: 'O God! God! oh! to have to die!' Louise was sleeping by his side. It was death that he had found again at the end of their kisses.