The note which had thus brought Pierre's anxiety to its extreme represented the first act in a plan invented by Madame Brion to put an immediate and irreparable end to a sentiment for which her friendly insight had led her to predict frightful suffering, a possible tragedy, a certain catastrophe. After Madame de Carlsberg's sudden and passionate confidences, she had said to herself that if she did not succeed in immediately separating these two beings, drawn to each other by such an instinctive attraction, the young man would not be slow to discover the sentiment he inspired in the woman he loved. It was only thanks to his remarkable ingenuousness and candor that he had not already discovered it.
When he knew the truth, what would happen? Ingenuous and candid though she was herself, Louise Brion could not evade the true answer to this question. As soon as an understanding took place between Hautefeuille and Ely, she would go to the end of her desire. She had too clearly revealed in her confession the indomitable audacity of her character, her need of complying with the demands of her passions. She would become the young man's mistress. Although the conversation of the night before had imposed upon Louise the evidence of faults already committed by her friend, neither her mind nor her heart could entertain the thought of these faults. The mere idea of this liaison filled her with a shudder of fright, almost of horror. All through the night she had tried to think of some way to obtain the only escape she could see for Ely, the voluntary departure of Hautefeuille.
Her first thought was to appeal to his delicacy. The portrait Madame de Carlsberg had drawn of him, his interesting face, his frank and honest look, the naïveté of his amorous action in buying the gold box, all revealed an exquisite fineness of nature. If she should write him, bravely, simply, an unsigned letter, speaking of that action, of that purchase which might have been, and no doubt had been, seen by others too? If on this account she should beg him to leave in order to save Madame de Carlsberg from trouble? During her long and feverish insomnia she had tried to formulate this letter, without discovering expressions which satisfied her.
It was so difficult to make such a request without letting it signify, "Go, because she loves you!"
Then in the morning, when she had wakened from the tardy sleep that ended this night of agony, a chance accident, commonplace enough, but in which her piety saw something providential, gave her an unexpected excuse for pleading, not with the young man at a distance, but with Madame de Carlsberg herself and at once. While reading distractedly in bed one of those newspapers of the Riviera, journals of international snobbism which communicate information concerning all these arrant aristocrats, she discovered the arrival at Cairo, of M. Olivier du Prat, secretary of the Embassy, and his wife; and she rose at once to show Ely these two lines of mundane news, so insignificant, yet so full of menace for her.
"If they are at Cairo," she said to the Baroness, "it means that their Nile trip is over, and that they think of returning. What is the natural route for them? From Alexandria to Marseilles. And if he is so near his friend, this man will wish to see him."
"It is true," said Ely, her heart beating wildly as she read the letters of that name, Olivier du Prat.
"It is true," she repeated. "They will meet again. Was I not right last night?"
"See," cried Louise Brion, "what it would have been if you had not had thus far the strength to fight against your sentiment. See what it will be if you do not put an end to it forever."
And she continued describing with all the eloquence of her passionate friendship a plan of conduct which suddenly occurred to her as the wisest and most effectual.