Even at this moment she was unable to explain it; she had evidently ceased to be herself; another mind and heart had controlled her actions.  Was it possible?  She had done those things?  Then an icy chill ran through her; she saw Jeanne borne away beneath roses.  But in the torpor begotten of her grief she grew very calm again, once more without a longing or curiosity, once more proceeding along the path of duty that lay so straight before her.  Life had again begun for her, fraught with austere peacefulness and pride of honesty.

Monsieur Rambaud now moved near her to lead her from this place of sadness.  But Helene silently signed to him her wish to linger a little longer.  Approaching the parapet she gazed below into the Avenue de la Muette, where a long line of old cabs in the last stage of decay stretched beside the footpath.  The hoods and wheels looked blanched, the rusty horses seemed to have been rotting there since the dark ages.  Some cabmen sat motionless, freezing within their frozen cloaks.  Over the snow other vehicles were crawling along, one after the other, with the utmost difficulty.  The animals were losing their foothold, and stretching out their necks, while their drivers with many oaths descended from their seats and held them by the bridle; and through the windows you could see the faces of the patient “fares,” reclining against the cushions, and resigning themselves to the stern necessity of taking three-quarters of an hour to cover a distance which in other weather would have been accomplished in ten minutes.  The rumbling of the wheels was deadened by the snow; only the voices vibrated upward, sounding shrill and distinct amidst the silence of the streets; there were loud calls, the laughing exclamations of people slipping on the icy paths, the angry whip-cracking of carters, and the snorting of terrified horses.  In the distance, to the right, the lofty trees on the quay seemed to be spun of glass, like huge Venetian chandeliers, whose flower-decked arms the designer had whimsically twisted.  The icy north wind had transformed the trunks into columns, over which waved downy boughs and feathery tufts, an exquisite tracery of black twigs edged with white trimmings.  It was freezing, and not a breath stirred in the pure air.

Then Helene told her heart that she had known nothing of Henri.  For a year she had seen him almost every day; he had lingered for hours and hours near her, to speak to her and gaze into her eyes.  Yet she knew nothing of him.  Whence had he come? how had he crept into her intimacy? what manner of man was he that she had yielded to him—­she who would rather have perished than yield to another?  She knew nothing of him; it had all sprung from some sudden tottering of her reason.  He had been a stranger to her on the last as on the first day.  In vain did she patch together little scattered things and circumstances—­his words, his acts, everything that her memory recalled concerning him.