I advanced on tiptoe, and the door being open, I could see Brigitte without being seen.

She was seated at her table and was writing in that same book that had aroused my suspicions.  She held in her left hand a little box of white wood which she looked at from time to time and trembled.  There was something sinister in the quiet that reigned in the room.  Her secretary was open and several bundles of papers were carefully ranged in order.

I made some noise at the door.  She rose, went to the secretary, closed it, then came to me with a smile: 

“Octave,” she said, “we are two children.  If you had not come here, I should have gone to you.  Pardon me, I was wrong.  Madame Daniel comes to dinner to-morrow; make me repent, if you choose, of what you call my despotism.  If you but love me I am happy; let us forget what is past and let us not spoil our happiness.”

CHAPTER III

EXPLANATIONS

But quarrel had been, so to speak, less sad than our reconciliation; it was attended, on Brigitte’s part, by a mystery which frightened me at first and then planted in my soul the seeds of constant dread.

There developed in me, in spite of my struggles, the two elements of misfortune which the past had bequeathed me:  at times furious jealousy attended by reproaches and insults; at other times a cruel gayety, an affected cheerfulness, that mockingly outraged whatever I held most dear.  Thus the inexorable spectres of the past pursued me without respite; thus Brigitte, seeing herself treated alternately as a faithless mistress and a shameless woman, fell into a condition of melancholy that clouded our entire life; and worst of all, that sadness even, the cause of which I knew, was not the most burdensome of our sorrows.  I was young and I loved pleasure; that daily association with a woman older than I, who suffered and languished, that face, more and more serious, which was always before me, all this repelled my youth and aroused within me bitter regrets for the liberty I had lost.

One night we were passing through the forest in the beautiful light of the moon, and both experienced a profound melancholy.  Brigitte looked at me in pity.  We sat down on a rock near a wild gorge and passed two entire hours there; her half-veiled eyes plunged into my soul, crossing a glance from mine; then wandered to nature, to the heavens and the valley.

“Ah! my dear child,” she said, “how I pity you!  You do not love me.”

To reach that rock we had to travel two leagues; two more in returning makes four.  Brigitte was afraid of neither fatigue nor darkness.  We set out at eleven at night, expecting to reach home some time in the morning.  When we went on long tramps she always dressed in a blue blouse and the apparel of a man, saying that skirts were not made for bushes.  She walked before me in the sand with a firm step