Returning home after the conversation which had chilled her with fear, and still gave her the keenest anxiety, Madame Jules took particular pains with her toilet for the night.  She wanted to make herself, and she did make herself enchanting.  She belted the cambric of her dressing-gown round her waist, defining the lines of her bust; she allowed her hair to fall upon her beautifully modelled shoulders.  A perfumed bath had given her a delightful fragrance, and her little bare feet were in velvet slippers.  Strong in a sense of her advantages she came in stepping softly, and put her hands over her husband’s eyes.  She thought him pensive; he was standing in his dressing-gown before the fire, his elbow on the mantel and one foot on the fender.  She said in his ear, warming it with her breath, and nibbling the tip of it with her teeth:—­

“What are you thinking about, monsieur?”

Then she pressed him in her arms as if to tear him away from all evil thoughts.  The woman who loves has a full knowledge of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effectual her coquetry.

“About you,” he answered.

“Only about me?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! that’s a very doubtful ‘yes.’”

They went to bed.  As she fell asleep, Madame Jules said to herself:—­

“Monsieur de Maulincour will certainly cause some evil.  Jules’ mind is preoccupied, disturbed; he is nursing thoughts he does not tell me.”

It was three in the morning when Madame Jules was awakened by a presentiment which struck her heart as she slept.  She had a sense both physical and moral of her husband’s absence.  She did not feel the arm Jules passed beneath her head,—­that arm in which she had slept, peacefully and happy, for five years; an arm she had never wearied.  A voice said to her, “Jules suffers, Jules is weeping.”  She raised her head, and then sat up; felt that her husband’s place was cold, and saw him sitting before the fire, his feet on the fender, his head resting against the back of an arm-chair.  Tears were on his cheeks.  The poor woman threw herself hastily from her bed and sprang at a bound to her husband’s knees.

“Jules! what is it?  Are you ill?  Speak, tell me!  Speak to me, if you love me!” and she poured out a hundred words expressing the deepest tenderness.

Jules knelt at her feet, kissed her hands and knees, and answered with fresh tears:—­

“Dear Clemence, I am most unhappy!  It is not loving to distrust the one we love.  I adore you and suspect you.  The words that man said to me to-night have struck to my heart; they stay there in spite of myself, and confound me.  There is some mystery here.  In short, and I blush to say it, your explanations do not satisfy me.  My reason casts gleams into my soul which my love rejects.  It is an awful combat.  Could I stay there, holding your head, and suspecting thoughts within it to me unknown?  Oh!  I believe in you, I believe