"Do you want a stamp?—You will find one in my writing case on the table."
"No, thank you," replied Olivier. "It is simply a line to be delivered by hand. I will leave it myself."
He went out, adding that he would be back for luncheon. He never dreamed that his wife burst into a passion of weeping the moment she was alone. She was now certain the letter was for the Baroness Ely. Then, like every jealous woman, she gave way to the irresistible, savage instinct of material research which mitigates nothing, satisfies nothing—for, suppose a proof of the justice of suspicion is discovered, does that make the jealous suffering inspired by that suspicion any easier to bear?
She went into her husband's room. In the wastepaper basket she saw the fragments of a score of letters, thrown there by the feverish hand of the young man. They were the drafts of the letters she had heard him begin and crumple up and destroy the night before. With trembling hands and burning cheeks, her throat parched with the horror of what she was doing, she gathered together and rearranged. She thus reconstituted the beginnings of a score of letters, letters of the most utter insignificance to any one unaided by the intuition of wounded love, but terribly, frightfully clear and precise to her.
They were all addressed to a woman. Berthe could read the incoherence of Olivier's thoughts in them. The entire gamut of sentiment was gone through, by turn ceremonious: "Madame, will you allow a visitor who has not yet had the honor;" ironical, "You will not be surprised, madame, that I cannot leave Cannes;" familiar, "I reproach myself, dear madame, for not having called upon you before this."
How the young man's pen had hesitated over the form of asking such a simple thing—the permission to pay a visit! This hesitation was, in itself, the certain proof of a mystery, and one of the fragments thus put together again revealed its nature: "Some vengeances are infamous, my dear Ely, and the one you have conceived—"
Olivier had written this in the most cruel minute of his insomnia. His suffering found relief in the insolent use of the Christian name, in the insulting remembrance of an ineffaceable intimacy. Then he tore up the sheet of paper into minute fragments which betrayed the rage consuming him. After she had put together and deciphered this fatal phrase Berthe saw nothing else. All her presentiments were well founded: Baroness Ely de Carlsberg, of whom Corancez had spoken to Hautefeuille in the train, was her husband's former mistress! He had only wanted to come to Cannes because she was there, so as to see her again! The letter in his hand a few minutes before had been for her! He had gone with it to her villa!
Face to face with this indisputable and overwhelming certainty, the young woman was seized with a convulsive trembling that increased as the hour for luncheon drew near.—It burst all bounds when, toward noon, she received a card from Olivier upon which he had scribbled in pencil—always the same handwriting!—that a friend whom he had met had insisted upon keeping him for luncheon, and he begged her not to wait for him!
"She has won him back from me! He is with her!"
When she had realized this thought, weighted with all the horrible pain given by evidence that pierces to the heart, like some glittering, icy cold knife, she felt that she could not support this physical suffering. With the automatic action that comes upon such occasions she put on her hat and veil and gloves. Then when she was dressed and ready for going out a final gleam of reason showed her the folly of the project she had conceived. She had thought of going to her rival's house, of surprising Olivier, and of finishing with it all forever!