“Treachery, dear mamma!” cried she.  “Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.—­If you only knew!  The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly.  I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father’s blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds—­of avenging myself—­of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after—­and so on.

“And yet he went there; he is there!—­That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts!  Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.—­Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison.  Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears?  Why take my Wenceslas?  —­I will go to see her and stab her!”

Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter’s head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses.

“Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained.  The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!—­I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years—­for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!—­Did you know that?”

“You, mamma, you!  You have endured this for twenty——­”

She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts.

“Do as I have done, my child,” said her mother.  “Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace.  On his death-bed a man may say, ‘My wife has never cost me a pang!’ And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us.  If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened?  Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me.  Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart—­a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family.  Neither your brother nor you could have married.

“I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father’s, the world has believed me happy.  My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man’s passion is taking him too far, that I see.  His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home.  However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it —­motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion—­I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor——­”