She put back the letter without understanding its meaning. The address
was certainly "Madame la Baronne Le Perthuis des Vauds."
Then she opened another: "Come this evening as soon as he goes out; we
shall have an hour together. I worship you." In another: "I passed the
night longing in vain for you, longing to look into your eyes, to
press my lips to yours, and I am insane enough to throw myself from
the window at the thought that you are another's...."
Jeanne was perfectly bewildered. What did that mean? To whom, for
whom, from whom were these words of love?
She went on reading, coming across fresh impassioned declarations,
appointments with warnings as to prudence, and always at the end the
six words: "Be sure to burn this letter!"
At last she opened an ordinary note, accepting an invitation to
dinner, but in the same handwriting and signed: "Paul d'Ennemare,"
whom the baron called, whenever he spoke of him, "My poor old Paul,"
and whose wife had been the baroness' dearest friend.
Then a suspicion, which immediately became a certainty, flashed across
Jeanne's mind: He had been her mother's lover.
And, almost beside herself, she suddenly threw aside these infamous
letters as she would have thrown off some venomous reptile and ran to
the window and began to cry piteously. Then, collapsing, she sank down
beside the wall, and hiding her face in the curtain so that no one
should hear her, she sobbed bitterly as if in hopeless despair.
She would have remained thus probably all night, if she had not heard
a noise in the adjoining room that made her start to her feet. It
might be her father. And all the letters were lying on the floor! He
would have to open only one of them to know all! Her father!
She darted into the other room and seizing the letters in handfuls,
she threw them all into the fireplace, those of her grandparents as
well as those of the lover; some that she had not looked at and some
that had remained tied up in the drawers of the desk. She then took
one of the tapers that burned beside the bed and set fire to this pile
of letters. When they were reduced to ashes she went back to the open
window, as though she no longer dared to sit beside the dead, and
began to cry again with her face in her hands: "Oh, my poor mamma! oh,
my poor mamma!"
The stars were paling. It was the cool hour that precedes the dawn.
The moon was sinking on the horizon and turning the sea to mother of
pearl. The recollection of the night she passed at the window when she
first came to the "Poplars" came to Jeanne's mind. How far away it
seemed, how everything was changed, how different the future now
seemed!