"Why nothing I assure you. Were you noticing my white hair?" But Madame Roubere impetuously seized her by the shoulders, and with a searching glance at her repeated: "What is the matter with you? Tell me what is the matter with you. And if you tell me a falsehood, I'll soon find it out." They remained face to face, and Madame Henriette, who became so pale that she was near fainting, had two pearly tears at each corner of her drooping eyes. Her sister went on asking: "What has happened to you? What is the matter with you? Answer me!" Then, in a subdued voice, the other murmured: "I have--I have a lover." And, hiding her forehead on the shoulder of her younger sister, she sobbed. Then, when she had grown a little calmer, when the heaving of her breast had subsided, she commenced to unbosom herself, as if to cast forth this secret from herself, to empty this sorrow of hers into a sympathetic heart. Thereupon, holding each other's hands tightly grasped, the two women went over to a sofa in a dark corner of the room, into which they sank, and the younger sister, passing her arm over the elder one's neck, and drawing her close to her heart, listened. * * * * * "Oh! I recognize that there was no excuse for one; I do not understand myself, and since that day I feel as if I were mad. Be careful my child, about yourself--be careful! If you only knew how weak we are, how quickly we yield, we fall. All it needs is a nothing, so little, so little, a moment of tenderness, one of those sudden fits of melancholy which steal into your soul, one of those longings to open your arms, to love, to embrace, which we all have at certain moments. "You know my husband, and you know how fond of him I am; but he is mature and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations of a woman's heart. He is always, always the same, always good, always smiling, always kind, always perfect. Oh! how I sometimes have wished that he would roughly clasp me in his arms, that he would embrace me with those slow, sweet kisses which make two beings intermingle, which are like mute confidences! How I wished that he was self-abandoned and even weak, so that he should have need of me, of my caress, of my tears! "This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that. How can we help it? "And yet the thought of deceiving never came near me. To-day, it has happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply because the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.