He accustomed himself, however, to feign, finding a sort of fierce pleasure in the constraint.  He learned to assume a countenance which completely hid his thoughts.  He submitted to his wife’s caresses without an apparent shudder; and shook Hector by the hand as heartily as ever.  In the evening, when they were gathered about the drawing-room table, he was the gayest of the three.  He built a hundred air-castles, pictured a hundred pleasure-parties, when he was able to go abroad again.  Hector rejoiced at his returning health.

“Clement is getting on finely,” said he to Bertha, one evening.

She understood only too well what he meant.

“Always thinking of Laurence?”

“Did you not permit me to hope?”

“I asked you to wait, Hector, and you have done well not to be in a hurry.  I know a young girl who would bring you, not one, but three millions as dowry.”

This was a painful surprise.  He really had no thoughts for anyone but Laurence, and now a new obstacle presented itself.

“And who is that?”

She leaned over, and whispered tremblingly in his ear: 

“I am Clement’s sole heiress; perhaps he’ll die; I might be a widow to-morrow.”

Hector was petrified.

“But Sauvresy, thank God! is getting well fast.”

Bertha fixed her large, clear eyes upon him, and with frightful calmness said: 

“What do you know about it?”

Tremorel dared not ask what these strange words meant.  He was one of those men who shun explanations, and who, rather than put themselves on their guard in time, permit themselves to be drawn on by circumstances; soft and feeble beings, who deliberately bandage their eyes so as not to see the danger which threatens them, and who prefer the sloth of doubt, and acts of uncertainty to a definite and open position, which they have not the courage to face.

Besides, Hector experienced a childish satisfaction in seeing Bertha’s distress, though he feared and detested her.  He conceived a great opinion of his own value and merit, when he saw the persistency and desperation with which she insisted on keeping her hold on him.

“Poor woman!” thought he.  “In her grief at losing me, and seeing me another’s, she has begun to wish for her husband’s death!”

Such was the torpor of his moral sense that he did not see the vileness of Bertha’s and his own thoughts.

Meanwhile Sauvresy’s state was not reassuring for Hector’s hopes and plans.  On the very day when he had this conversation with Bertha, her husband was forced to take to his bed again.  This relapse took place after he had drank a glass of quinine and water, which he had been accustomed to take just before supper; only, this time, the symptoms changed entirely, as if one malady had yielded to another of a very different kind.  He complained of a pricking in his skin, of vertigo, of convulsive