After long reflection, not seeing any issue to her deplorable situation, Mme. Fauvel determined to yield.
By consenting to everything demanded of her, she had a chance of saving her husband from suffering and disgrace.
She well knew that to act thus was to prepare a life of torture for herself; but she alone would be the victim, and, at any rate, she would be gaining time. Heaven might at last interpose, and save her from ruin.
In the meantime, M. Fauvel had returned home, and Valentine resumed her accustomed duties.
But she was no longer the happy mother and devoted wife, whose smiling presence was wont to fill the house with sunshine and comfort. She was melancholy, anxious, and at times irritable.
Hearing nothing of Clameran, she expected to see him appear at any moment; trembling at every knock, and turning pale when a strange step was heard to enter, she dared not leave the house, for fear he should come during her absence.
Her agony was like that of a condemned man, who, each day as he wakes from his uneasy slumber, asks himself, “Am I to die to-day?”
Clameran did not come; he wrote, or rather, as he was too prudent to furnish arms which could be used against him, he had a note written, which Mme. Fauvel alone might understand, in which he said that he was quite ill, and unable to call upon her; and hoped she would be so good as to come to his room the next day; she had only to ask for 317, Hotel du Louvre.
The letter was almost a relief for Mme. Fauvel. Anything was preferable to suspense. She was ready to consent to everything.
She burned the letter, and said, “I shall go.”