Then she sunk exhausted into the armchair in which Sulpice had been sitting, and her breast heaved with a violent sob that tore it as if it would rend it.
Sulpice looked at Lissac who was standing half-inclined, as in the presence of a misfortune. He instinctively seized the minister by the shoulder and gently forced him toward Adrienne, saying to him in a whisper, in ill-assured tones:
"Kiss her then! One pardons when one loves!"
With a supplicating cry, Vaudrey threw himself on his knees before Adrienne, while Lissac hastily opened the door and left, feeling indeed that he could not say a word and that Vaudrey only could obtain Vaudrey's pardon.
"I, in my anger," he said, "he, in his jealousy, have allowed ourselves to get into a passion. It is stupid. One should speak lower."
He went away, much dissatisfied with himself and but little less with Vaudrey. Again he considered this man foolish, adored as he was by such a wife, whom he deceived. He was not sure that at the bottom of his own heart he did not feel a sentiment of love toward Adrienne. Ah! if he had been loved by such a creature, he would have been capable of great things!—He would have arranged and utilized his life instead of spoiling it. In place of vulgar love, he would have kept this unique love intact from the altar to the tomb!
Pale and tottering, and a child once more under her sorrow, as he had just seen her, she was so adorably lovely that he had received an entirely new impression, one of almost jealousy against Sulpice, and therefore, brusquely overcoming this strange, unseemly emotion, he had himself thrust Vaudrey toward his wife and had departed hastily, as if he felt that he must hurry away and never see them again. But as he left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched, suffering look and the young wife's sorrowful voice went with him, repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief:
"Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!" thought Guy.
In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of the passage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons. A fête! And this evening! In the arrival of those flowers for decoration, at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom.