her.  Beneath her feverish unrest a fear lingered; she imagined that her husband knew everything.  He had come home the night before trembling with agitation.  She overwhelmed Helene with questions; and Helene, with a hardihood and facility at which she herself was amazed, poured into her ears a story, every detail of which she invented offhand.  She vowed to Juliette that her husband doubted her in nothing.  It was she, Helene, who had become acquainted with everything, and, wishing to save her, had devised that plan of breaking in upon their meeting.  Juliette listened to her, put instant credit in the fiction, and, beaming through her tears, grew sunny with joy.  She threw herself once more on Helene’s neck.  Her caresses brought no embarrassment to the latter; she now experienced none of the honorable scruples that had at one time affected her.  When she left her lover’s wife after extracting a promise from her that she would try to be calm, she laughed in her sleeve at her own cunning; she was in a transport of delight.

Some days slipped away.  Helene’s whole existence had undergone a change; and in the thoughts of every hour she no longer lived in her own home, but with Henri.  The only thing that existed for her was that next-door house in which her heart beat.  Whenever she could find an excuse to do so she ran thither, and forgot everything in the content of breathing the same air as her lover.  In her first rapture the sight of Juliette even flooded her with tenderness; for was not Juliette one of Henri’s belongings?  He had not, however, again been able to meet her alone.  She appeared loth to give him a second assignation.  One evening, when he was leading her into the hall, she even made him swear that he would never again visit the house in the Passage des Eaux, as such an act might compromise her.

Meantime, Jeanne was shaken by a short, dry cough, that never ceased, but became severer towards evening every day.  She would then be slightly feverish, and she grew weak with the perspiration that bathed her in her sleep.  When her mother cross-questioned her, she answered that she wasn’t ill, that she felt no pain.  Doubtless her cold was coming to an end.  Helene, tranquillized by the explanation, and having no adequate idea of what was going on around her, retained, however, in her bosom, amidst the rapture that made up her life, a vague feeling of sorrow, of some weight that made her heart bleed despite herself.  At times, when she was plunged in one of those causeless transports which made her melt with tenderness, an anxious thought would come to her—­she imagined that some misfortune was hovering behind her.  She turned round, however, and then smiled.  People are ever in a tremble when they are too happy.  There was nothing there.  Jeanne had coughed a moment before, but she had some tisane to drink; there would be no ill effects.