"Then," said Helen, frozen now by this reply, "if you believed it, why did you never speak of it to me? If the thought of it governed you when you asked me to be yours, if you considered that you had less responsibility towards me by reason of it, why did you entertain no doubt about it? Were you sure of it? Had you seen it? Was there not a chance against it being true—a chance, a single chance? Why, are you not aware that it is a crime to take all a woman's heart, and to keep thoughts of that kind in one's own?"
"Tut!" he replied, shrugging his shoulders; "you would have thought me perfectly ridiculous if I had not been your lover. Your past belonged to you alone, and I had no right to call you to account for it any more than for your future. As to the present, I know you well enough to be sure that you are not a woman who would take two lovers at the same time."
"'Tis a great honour," she replied in an almost stifled voice. She was pale as death. The egotism and insensibility of the man she loved paralysed her with such horror that her tears would no longer come. She felt but one desire: to leave this man, to see no longer those eyes and those lips—those lips that she had loved so well, and which had always lied so to her, since from the very first day he had believed this without proof! Mechanically she resumed her cloak and muff, and fastened her veil.
"Good-bye," she said. It would have been impossible for her to continue the conversation just then, so choked was she with indignation.
He did not try to detain her, and also said:
"Good-bye."
She left the room, and he accompanied her, without a word being spoken on either side, to the outer door. The latter once closed, he returned to the drawing-room, where no trace of the tragic scene enacted in it remained but the disarrangement of the easy chair that had been pushed aside by Helen as she rose.
"All has passed off better than I expected," he said to himself. "How easy it is to pin them to the wall with a little fact! Well! it is over."
"It is over," he repeated aloud with that strange feeling both of relief and of distress which accompanies the interruption of love. "She was very pretty," he reflected to himself. "Now we must be on the look out for revenge. But what revenge? She has not a note in which I speak familiarly to her. I shall have the trouble of taking away all those trifles of hers at Madame Palmyre's. I will have them returned to her later on, when we have reached the stage at which she can say to me 'You gave me great pain,' with the letter of my successor in her bosom, between the chemisette and her skin."
He sat down again in front of the fire, from which he drew a few sparks.