descendeding from her eyes; they were closed; her head fell on the back of her armchair; her teeth clenched; all her limbs were quivering; the quivering was followed by a fainting spell that seemed due to the apprehension that she had worked up at the door to the house. The duration of this state frightened me. I took her mantelet from her, I loosened the strings of her dress and petticoat and splashed a bit of cold water on her face. Her eyes opened halfway; one could hear a muffled murmuring in her throat. She was trying to say: I am odious to you. She only articulated the last syllables of the phrase, then issued a piercing cry. Her eyelids lowered, and the fainting spell began again. Gardeil, seated coldly on his armchair, his elbow resting on the table and head rested on his hand, watched her without emotion and left it to me to care for her. I told him repeatedly: `But, monsieur, she is dying... we have to call for someone.´ He answered me by smiling and shrugging his shoulders: `Women lead a hard life. They do not die over such a little thing as this. This will pass. You do not know them very well. Their bodies do whatever they want them to do.´ `She is dying, I tell you.´ Her body was as if without strength or life. It slipped away from the top of the armchair, and she would have fallen to the ground to the left or right had I not been holding her. Meanwhile Gardeil rose up brusquely, and, pacing his apartment, said with an impatient and moody tone: `I could do without this dismal scene. I do hope this will be the last. Who the devil does she bear a grudge against? I loved her; I will smash my head into a brick wall if that is the least bit false. I do not love her anymore, she knows that now, or she will never know it. Everything has been said...´ `No, monsieur, everything has not been said. What? You believe that a good man has only to strip a woman of everything she has and leave her?´ `What do you want me to do? I am begging as much as she is.´ `What do I want you to do? To associate your misery with the one that you have reduced her to.´ `You enjoyed saying that. She would be no better for it, and I would be much worse.´ `You would act like this to a friend that has sacrificed everything for you?´ `A friend! A friend! I do not have much faith in friends, and this experience has taught me to have no passion for them. I am frustrated that I did not realize this sooner.´ `And it is right that this unfortunate woman should be the victim of your heart´s errors.´ `And what is to say that one month, a day later, I would not have been just as cruelly the error of hers.´ `What is to say? Everything that she has done for you, and the state that you see her in.´ `What she did for me?... By God! He is fully acquitted by the loss of my time.´ `Oh, monsieur Gardeil, what a comparison between your time and all the priceless things that you have taken from her!´ `I have done nothing, I am nothing, I am