His manner toward her, on his return, astonished Mme. Blanche. She almost believed she saw again the Martial of the little blue salon at Courtornieu; but the realization of her cherished dream was now only another torture added to all the others.
Martial was striving to carry his plan into execution, when the following laconic epistle came to him one day through the post:
“Monsieur le Duc—I, if I were in your place, would watch my wife.”
It was only an anonymous letter, but Martial’s blood mounted to his forehead.
“Can it be that she has a lover?” he thought.
Then reflecting on his own conduct toward his wife since their marriage, he said to himself:
“And if she has, have I any right to complain? Did I not tacitly give her back her liberty?”
He was greatly troubled, and yet he would not have degraded himself so much as to play the spy, had it not been for one of those trifling circumstances which so often decide a man’s destiny.
He was returning from a ride on horseback one morning about eleven o’clock, and he was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when he saw a lady hurriedly emerge from the house. She was very plainly dressed—entirely in black—but her whole appearance was strikingly that of the duchess.
“It is certainly my wife; but why is she dressed in such a fashion?” he thought.