the months—­fourteen:  that made two years when she took the remaining period into consideration—­exactly the time within a fortnight.  Then her brain conjured up a sunny picture of Italy, a realm of dreamland, with golden fruits where lovers wandered through the perfumed nights, with arms round one another’s waists.  Henri and Juliette were pacing before her eyes beneath the light of the moon.  They loved as husband and wife do when passion is once more awakened within them.  To think of it—­a tiny girl, rosy and fat, its bare body flushed by the warm sunshine, while it strives to stammer words which its mother arrests with kisses!  And Helene thought of all this without any anger; her heart was mute, yet seemingly derived yet greater quietude from the sadness of her spirit.  The land of the sun had vanished from her vision; her eyes wandered slowly over Paris, on whose huge frame winter had laid his freezing hand.  Above the Pantheon another patch of blue was now spreading in the heavens.

Meanwhile memory was recalling the past to life.  At Marseilles she had spent her days in a state of coma.  One morning as she went along the Rue des Petites-Maries, she had burst out sobbing in front of the home of her childhood.  That was the last occasion on which she had wept.  Monsieur Rambaud was her frequent visitor; she felt his presence near her to be a protection.  Towards autumn she had one evening seen him enter, with red eyes and in the agony of a great sorrow; his brother, Abbe Jouve, was dead.  In her turn she comforted him.  What followed she could not recall with any exactitude of detail.  The Abbe ever seemed to stand behind them, and influenced by thought of him she succumbed resignedly.  When M. Rambaud once more hinted at his wish, she had nothing to say in refusal.  It seemed to her that what he asked was but sensible.  Of her own accord, as her period of mourning was drawing to an end, she calmly arranged all the details with him.  His hands trembled in a transport of tenderness.  It should be as she pleased; he had waited for months; a sign sufficed him.  They were married in mourning garb.  On the wedding night he, like her first husband, kissed her bare feet—­feet fair as though fashioned out of marble.  And thus life began once more.

While the belt of blue was broadening on the horizon, this awakening of memory came with an astounding effect on Helene.  Had she lived through a year of madness, then?  To-day, as she pictured the woman who had lived for nearly three years in that room in the Rue Vineuse, she imagined that she was passing judgment on some stranger, whose conduct revolted and surprised her.  How fearfully foolish had been her act! how abominably wicked!  Yet she had not sought it.  She had been living peacefully, hidden in her nook, absorbed in the love of her daughter.  Untroubled by any curious thoughts, by any desire, she had seen the road of life lying before her.  But a breath had swept by, and she had fallen.