"I can not only understand, but excuse it, in one so crushed with grief and disappointment. Your situation was so trying that it was only natural that you should endeavour to divert and console yourself."
"I scarcely need tell you, then, that I thought of Michel all that night in spite of myself. Early the next morning I ran to my window, and gazed eagerly out through the protecting blinds. The day was superb, and Michel spent it as he had spent the previous day, stretched out upon a couch on the veranda, smoking, reading, dreaming, and enjoying to the full the happiness of being alive, as he told me afterwards. During the day, a man dressed in black, and carrying a large portfolio under his arm, visited him. Thanks to my lorgnette I soon discovered that he was Michel's man of affairs. In fact, he drew several papers from his portfolio, apparently with the intention of reading them to Michel, but the latter took them and signed them without even taking the trouble to glance over them, after which the visitor drew from his pocket a roll of bank-notes, which he handed to your cousin, apparently with the request that he would count them, which he refused to do, thus showing his blind confidence in this man."
"All of which goes to prove that our dear cousin is very careless in business matters."
"Alas! that is only too true, unfortunately for him."
"What! is his fortune—?"
"You shall know all if you will give me your attention a few minutes longer. During the day, which was spent in complete idleness, like the one which had preceded it, Michel's nurse brought him a letter. He read it. Ah, Florence, never have I seen compassion so touchingly depicted upon any human face. He opened the desk in which he had placed the bank-notes, and handed one to his nurse. The good woman threw her arms around his neck, and you can not imagine with what delightful emotion he seemed to receive her almost maternal caresses.
"It was long after sunset," continued Valentine, "before I could again shut myself up in my own room, and return to my dear window. But I had scarcely looked out before I saw a young woman enter the gallery and hasten towards Michel. It was a terrible shock to me. It was both stupid and foolish in me, of course, for I had not the slightest claim upon Michel, but the feeling was not only involuntary but uncontrollable, and, darting away from the window, I threw myself in an armchair, and burying my face in my hands, wept long and bitterly. Subsequently, I fell into a deep reverie, from which I was aroused a couple of hours afterwards by a prelude upon the piano, and soon two voices that harmonised perfectly began to sing the impassioned duet of Mathilde and Arnold from the opera of 'Guillaume Tell.'"
"It was Michel?"
"Yes, Michel and that woman!"
It is impossible to describe the way in which Valentine uttered the words, "That woman."