What a terrible word that is, to which I never gave a thought--adultery! And how just it is! It is the stranger at the hearth. It is a forged Race. It is the creation of a hybrid personality like mine. That is the secret of the vacillations of my nature, of the contradictions that I never could explain: why I have never loved in my inmost heart any of the women of my caste, and why, even to-day, I cannot bring myself to a simple and definite decision. I shall come to it. My relations with him are impossible. That is the one fact to which I must cling, firmly, irrevocably. Let the occasion come to dig the abyss, and I will dig it!" This second line of reasoning corresponded too nearly with the actual situation not to prevail in the young man's mind. He retained, none the less, deep down in his heart, a hope, almost a certainty, that he would not be required to adapt his conduct to it. One need not have in his veins blood imbued with contradictory inherited characteristics, to be subject to such incoherences. It is enough to be passionately attached to some one from whom one deems it necessary to part forever. So that he felt a shock that was most painful to him, as he was returning from his ride, upon meeting, in one of the streets of the town, the colonel of his regiment, on foot,--the one who did not like "names with currents of air." He was the son of a petty government official who had reached his present rank by a combination of energy and shrewdness,--a good officer with fundamentally false ideas, in whose heart were fermenting those extraordinary anticlerical and anti-noble passions of which sincere Jacobinism is made. The expression of his superior, by whom he knew that he was detested, froze Landri's blood, it betrayed such ironical and fiendish delight. He did not mistake its meaning. The supposition hitherto treated as imaginary was coming true. It began to take shape. The hostile colonel's face expressed the satisfied hatred of one who knows with certainty that misfortune is about to befall his enemy. The affair of the inventories was about to be solved, and he, Landri, was involved in it in some way or other. Five minutes later this presentiment became an established fact. As he dismounted, his orderly handed him a note from Captain Despois, begging him to come to his quarters about an important matter connected with the service. "That's what it is," said Landri to himself. "We are to go." He found the devout officer, whose most secret thoughts he knew, so intimate was their confidence, busily writing, in the exceedingly modest salon that he used as an office. Despois was a man of forty-five, very tall, with a bony, tanned face, his temples worn smooth by the rubbing of the helmet, hair already almost white, reddish mustache, and light greenish-gray eyes. The eyes were clouded with so sad an expression that Landri was deceived.