"She does not even know of the step I have taken," replied the husband. "She causes me much anxiety. You know how she is wasting away; you have seen her several times lately."
Doctor Louvet listened in the attitude of his portrait, with his eyelids half closed. Although he was completely master of himself, as became a man accustomed daily to receive the confidences of many persons deprived of hypocrisy by the presence of danger, he was unable, on hearing these words of Chazel's, to restrain a movement of his eyelids. Rapid as was this movement and the glance which accompanied it, it could not escape poor Alfred, whose whole powers of attention were at that moment concentrated upon the doctor's face. Why did that glance cause him a little shiver, and tempt him to ask:
"When have you seen my wife?"
But it was a question impossible to put. Moreover, the physician was already making his reply.
"When Madame Chazel did me the honour to consult me last"—and this word expressed both everything and nothing—"she appeared to me to be suffering more particularly in the nervous system."
And he entered into lengthened details respecting the delicacy of the feminine organisation, dwelling upon the contrast between the life to which his patient had been accustomed in the country and the life of Paris. Lacking in observation as Alfred might be, his habit of reasoning with precision forced him to recognise the vagueness of this talk, and he asked somewhat heedlessly:
"And you have no observation to make to the husband?"
"None," replied Louvet with a half smile, "unless it be to spoil our dear patient a good deal and to contradict her as little as possible."
Alfred's heart sank within his breast, and while the liveried servant, who waited fashionably in the physician's ante-chamber, was assisting him to put on his overcoat, he was already being gnawed by this thought:
"Helen has deceived me. It was not the doctor who ordered her to live apart from me. She has come to have a horror of me; but, what have I done to her?"