On the very evening of the day of his conversation with Ella Virieux, who, without attaching any further importance to the matter, had reported to him the secrets which Ludovic had confided to her lover, he was at the Rue Vaneau and relating to Madame Liauran, who was reclining beside Madame Castel's easy chair, the unlooked-for news which was at a stroke to change the aspect of the strife between mother and mistress.
"Ah! the wretch!" cried the poor woman, half-dead from her lengthened anguish, "she was not even capable of loving him——"
She uttered these words in a deep tone, wherein were condensed all the ideas which she had formed so long before about her son's mistress. She had thought so much about what the nature of this guilty creature's passion could possibly be to render it more potent over Hubert's heart than her own love, which, for all that, she knew to be infinite! Shaking her whitened head, so wearied with musing, she went on:
"And it is for such a woman as this that he has tortured us! Ah! mamma, when he compares what he has sacrificed with what he has preferred, he will not understand his own behaviour."
Then, holding out her hand to George:
"Thank you, cousin," she said. "You have saved me. If this horrible intrigue had lasted, I should have died."
"Alas, my poor daughter," said Madame Castel, stroking her hair, "do not feed upon vain hopes. If Hubert has ever loved you he loves you still. Nothing is changed. There is only one evil action the more committed by this woman, and she must be accustomed to it."
"Then you think that he will not know of all this?" said Marie Alice, raising herself. "But I should be the basest of the base if I were not to open this unhappy child's eyes. So long as I believed that she loved him, I was able to keep silence. Guilty as such love might be, it nevertheless had passion; it was something sincere after all, something erring, yet exalted—but now, what name can you give such abominations?"
"Be prudent, cousin," said George Liauran, somewhat disquieted by the anger with which these last words had been uttered; "remember that we are not in a position to give poor Hubert such palpable and undeniable proofs as would baffle all discussion."
"But what further proof do you want," she broke in, "than the assertion of a spectator?"