“But I am losing my senses. If you are innocent, who, then, could be the guilty man?”
Jacques seized her hands almost madly, and pressing them painfully, and bending over her so closely that she felt his hot breath like a flame touching her face, he hissed into her ear,—
“You, wretched creature, you!”
And then pushing her from him with such violence that she fell into a chair, he continued,—
“You, who wanted to be a widow in order to prevent me from breaking the chains in which you held me. At our last meeting, when I thought you were crushed by grief, and felt overcome by your hypocritical tears, I was weak enough, I was stupid enough, to say that I married Dionysia only because you were not free. Then you cried, ‘O God, how happy I am that that idea did not occur to me before!’ What idea was that, Genevieve? Come, answer me and confess, that it occurred to you too soon after all, since you have carried it out?”
And repeating with crushing irony the words just uttered by the countess, he said,—
“If you are innocent, who, then, would be the guilty man?”
Quite beside herself, she sprang up from her chair, and casting at Jacques one of those glances which seem to enter through our eyes into the very heart of our hearts, she asked,—
“Is it really possible that you have not committed this abominable crime?”
He shrugged his shoulders.