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swung round on her with blazing cheeks. “You don’t believe me, Thérèse, eh? So much the worse for you; now you shall know everything. He’s let me down again—bolted, I don’t know where! Run away with another woman. So now you know! Well, do you believe me?”
    All the colour had left Mme. de Fontanin’s face. Unthinking, she repeated: “Run away with another woman!”
    Noémie had flung herself upon the sofa and buried her head among the cushions.
    “Oh, if you only knew how he’s made me suffer! I’ve forgiven him too often, so he thinks I’ll go on forgiving him all the time. He’s greatly mistaken. Never again! The way he’s treated me is positively atrocious. Under my eyes, in my own house, he seduced a little slut of a maid I had here, a wretched brat of nineteen. She decamped, bag and baggage, a fortnight ago without giving notice or anything. And, would you believe it, he was waiting for her at the front door, with a cab!” Her voice grew shrill and she jumped up from the sofa. “In the street where I live, at my own door, in broad daylight, with my own servant. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”
    Mme. de Fontanin had gone to the piano and was steadying herself against it; she was feeling on the verge of collapse. A picture was taking form before her, of Mariette as she had seen her a few months earlier, of all the little things she had noticed then, their furtive contacts as they brushed against each other in the hall, her husband’s surreptitious expeditions up to the sixth floor, where the maid’s bedroom was, until that day when it had become impossible to overlook what was going on, when she had had to dismiss the girl, who, overcome by remorse, had begged her mistress’s forgiveness. And she remembered the glimpse she had had of that little shop-girl in black, drying her eyes, beside the river bank. Now, looking up, she saw Noémie in front of her, and she averted her eyes. But her gaze drifted involuntarily back to the handsome woman sprawling across the sofa, the bare shoulder shaken by spasms of sobbing, and the gleam of white flesh under the filmy lace. And the picture that rose before her then was the most horrible of all.
    Noémie’s voice was reaching her consciousness by fits and starts.
    “But it’s over now! I’m through with him. He can come back, he can go down on his bended knees, I won’t give him a look. I hate and despise him. I’ve caught him lying time after time without the faintest reason, just to amuse himself, because he’s built that way. He can’t open his mouth without lying. He doesn’t know what it means to tell the truth.”
    “You’re unjust to him, Noémie.”
    The younger woman sprang up in amazement. “You of all people! You defend him!” But Mme. de Fontanin had regained her self-control; when she spoke again her voice had changed.
    “You haven’t got the address of that … that maid?”
    Noémie reflected for a moment, then, bending towards her, answered with a confidential air:
    “No. But the concierge, perhaps …”
    Thérèse cut her short with a quick gesture, and began to move towards the door. To hide her discomfiture Noémie buried her face amongst the cushions and made as if she did not see her going.
    In the hall, as Mme. de Fontanin was drawing aside the front-door curtain, she suddenly felt Nicole’s arms hugging her passionately; the little girl’s face was wet with tears. She had no time to say anything to the child, who kissed her again, almost hysterically, and ran back into the apartment.
    The concierge was only too glad to gossip. “Yes, Ma’am, I readdress her letters to the place in the country where she comes from. It’s Perros-Guirec, in Brittany; her folks send them on to her, I expect. If you’d like to know the address …” She opened a greasy, well-thumbed address-book.
    On her way home Mme. de Fontanin entered a post-office, and filled in a telegraph-form.

    Victorine Le Gad,
    Place de