“‘I shall be every day, at three o’clock, at our home, in the Rue Spontini.’ It was not a lover, your lover, who said these things? No! it was a stranger, an unknown person.” She straightened herself, and with painful gravity said: “Yes, I had been his. You knew it. I have denied it, I have told an untruth, not to irritate or grieve you. I saw you so anxious. But I lied so little and so badly. You knew. Do not reproach me for it. You knew; you often spoke to me of the past, and then one day somebody told you at the restaurant--and you imagined much more than ever happened. While telling an untruth, I was not deceiving you. If you knew the little that he was in my life! There! I did not know you. I did not know you were to come. I was lonely.” She fell on her knees. “I was wrong. I should have waited for you. But if you knew how slight a matter that was in my life!” And with her voice modulated to a soft and singing complaint she said: “Why did you not come sooner, why?” She dragged herself to him, tried to take his hands. He repelled her. “I was stupid. I did not think. I did not know. I did not wish to know.” He rose and exclaimed, in an explosion of hatred: “I did not wish him to be that man.” She sat in the place which he had left, and there, plaintively, in a low voice, she explained the past. In that time she lived in a world horribly commonplace. She had yielded, but she had regretted at once. If he but knew the sadness of her life he would not be jealous. He would pity her. She shook her head and said, looking at him through the falling locks of her hair: “I am talking to you of another woman. There is nothing in common between that woman and me. I exist only since I have known you, since I have belonged to you.” He walked about the room madly. He laughed painfully. “Yes; but while you loved me, the other woman--the one who was not you?” She looked at him indignantly: “Can you believe--” “Did you not see him again at Florence? Did you not accompany him to the station?” She told him that he had come to Italy to find her; that she had seen him; that she had broken with him; that he had gone, irritated, and that since then he was trying to win her back; but that she had not even paid any attention to him. “My beloved, I see, I know, only you in the world.” He shook his head. “I do not believe you.” She revolted. “I have told you everything. Accuse me, condemn me, but do not offend me in my love for you.” He shook his head. “Leave me. You have harmed me too much. I have loved you so much that all the pain which you could have given me I would have taken, kept, loved; but this is too hideous. I hate it. Leave me. I am suffering too much. Farewell!” She stood erect. “I have come. It is my happiness, it is my life, I am fighting for. I will not go.”