"You speak truly, Charles," said Bertha, sorrowfully, "our jealousy is not the same. Mine springs from my heart, yours from your pride; but it matters not, and I respect it equally. Have you ever once heard me complain of the seclusion in which I live? Except my father, whom you permit me to visit twice a-week, and a few members of your own family it is your pleasure I should receive, I live entirely alone. Oh, let me hasten to thank you for granting me the happiness of communing with my own thoughts undisturbed by the great and the gay!"
"Yet all this enjoyment does not prevent your finding the time long and tedious; and every body knows the effects solitude and want of occupation produce in the minds of females."
"But I am never unoccupied—never for an instant. You know how passionately fond I am of music; then I draw, I read. As for the solitude, your being more at home does not depend upon me."
While Madame de Brévannes was speaking, her husband had approached the window, and mechanically opened the curtains drawn before it. He observed on the other side of the street, on the first floor of the house opposite his own, lights in the window corresponding to the one by which he stood, and through the glass he could discern the outline of a man attentively gazing from that window.
It was now nearly five o'clock in the morning, all was dark without, and the street was perfectly deserted; what object of interest, then, could the individual opposite have in thus keeping watch, unless it were to reconnoiter the windows of Madame de Brévannes' apartment, doubtless the only one throughout the house in which a light was burning at that unusual hour?
One of those absurd suspicions which enter only into the brain of jealous deceivers (a class essentially distinct from that of jealous deceived)—we repeat that a suspicion of the most absurd description all at once entered the mind of M. de Brévannes, who, turning quickly round towards his wife, and looking at her with angry glances and threatening countenance, exclaimed,—
"Madam, I insist upon knowing wherefore that light is burning in the opposite house."
"Madam, I insist upon knowing wherefore that light is burning in the opposite house?" then suddenly interrupting himself, to give way to a suggestion equally ridiculous with his jealousy, he abruptly drew back the curtain, opened the window, and went out upon the balcony, where he took up his station with an air of proud defiance.
At this unexpected apparition, the curtains of the opposite windows were hastily closed, the shadow disappeared, and almost immediately the light was extinguished.