"What are you going to do?"
"What I promised," replied Hautefeuille.
Re-entering his room, he put the unopened letter in another envelope. He then wrote on it Madame de Carlsberg's name and the address of her villa. Returning to the corridor he handed it to the servant, saying:—
"There is the reply."
And when he again took Olivier's arm he felt it trembled more than his own did.
CHAPTER XI
BETWEEN TWO TRAGEDIES
Ely awaited Pierre's reply to her letter without apprehension. Immediately Olivier had left she wrote, impelled by an instinctive, an irresistible desire to refresh and purify herself in Hautefeuille's loyal, devoted tenderness, after the cruel scene from which she issued broken, humiliated, and soiled. Not for a single minute did she do Olivier the injustice of suspecting that he would, even though possessed by the most hateful love, try to destroy the image that Pierre had of her—an image that bore no resemblance to her in the past, but now so true—so true to the inner nature of her present being.
She said nothing in this letter to her lover that she had not told him twenty times before—that she loved him, then again that she loved him, and, finally, that she loved him. She was sure that he would also reply with words of love, already read and re-read a score of times, but always new and welcome as an untasted happiness. When she received the envelope upon which Pierre had written her address, she weighed it in her hands, with the joy of a child. "How good he is to send me such a long letter!" And she tore it open in an ecstasy of love that was at once changed to terror. She looked first at her own letter with the seal unbroken and then again at the envelope bearing her name. Was it possible that such an insult had really been paid her by "her sweet," as she called her lover, with the affectation common to all sentiments? Could such an insult really have come from Pierre, who that very night had clasped her to his bosom with so much respect, mingled with his idolatry, with piety almost in his passion?
Alas, doubt was not possible! The address was in the young man's handwriting. It was certainly he who returned the letter to his mistress without even opening it. Following the terrible scene of a short time before, this refusal to hear from her, this return of her letter, signified a rupture. The motive of it was indicated to Ely's terrified eyes with hideous plainness. It was impossible for her to guess the exact truth. She could not divine that it had been brought about by Berthe du Prat's jealousy,—a jealousy awakened by so many suspicions which started the long-continued inner tragedy and ended in the irresistible impulse which drove the young wife to make the most desperate appeal to the most intimate friend of her husband, to make an appeal that revealed all to him. It was a succession of chances that nothing could have foretold.