"And you, too, my dear Madame Dutertre, to abuse an honest confidence!" said M. Pascal, hiding his anger under a veil of sweetness, "to strike me in my dearest hope, ah, this is generous! God grant that I may not give myself up to cruel retaliation! After two years of friendship to part with such sentiments! But it must be, it must be!" added Pascal, looking alternately at Dutertre and his wife. "Is all ended between us?"
Sophie and her husband preserved a silence full of resignation and dignity.
"Oh, well," said Pascal, taking his hat, "another proof of the ingratitude of men, alas!"
"Monsieur," cried Dutertre, exasperated beyond measure at the affected sensibility of Pascal, "in the presence of the frightful blow with which you intend to crush us, this continued sarcasm is atrocious. Leave us, leave us!"
"Ah, here I am driven away from this house by people who are conscious of owing their happiness to me for so long a time,—their salvation even, they owe to me," said Pascal, walking slowly toward the door. "Driven away from here! I! Ah, this mortifying grief disappoints me, indeed!"
Then, pausing, he rummaged his pocket, and drew out the little purse that Sophie had given him a few moments before, and, handing it to the young wife, he said, with a pitiless accent of sardonic contrition:
"Happily, they are mute, or these pearls of steel would tell me every moment how much my name was blessed in this house from which I am driven away."
Then, with the air of changing his mind, he put the purse back in his pocket, after looking at it with a melancholy smile, and said:
"No, no, I will keep you, poor little innocent purse. You will recall to me the little good I have done, and the cruel deception which has been my reward."
So saying, M. Pascal put his hand on the knob of the door, opened it, and went out, while Sophie and her husband and her father sat in gloomy silence.