Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing heart came near to killing her.  As she held Calyste in her arms, her nose at his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of that letter paper!  Another woman’s head had lain there, whose hair and face had left that adulterous odor!  She had just kissed the spot where the kisses of her rival were still warm.

“What is the matter?” asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back to consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her smell salts.

“Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both!  Yes, my milk has turned, I feel it.  They won’t come at once unless you fetch them yourself—­go!”

Calyste, alarmed, rushed out.  The moment Sabine heard the closing of the porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked about the salon as if beside herself, crying out, “My God! my God! my God!”

Those two words took the place of all ideas.  The crisis she had seized upon as a pretext in reality took place.  The hairs of her head were like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever.  Her boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try to issue from all her pores.  She was blind for a few moments, and cried aloud, “I am dying!”

At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in.  After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend, Madame de Portenduere.  Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her brain like straws at the will of a waterspout.  “I saw,” she said later, “myriads all at once.”

She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one mad desire—­to have certainty:—­

  To Madame la Baronne du Guenic: 

Dear Mamma,—­When you come to Paris, as you allow us to hope you will, I shall thank you in person for the beautiful present by which you and my aunt Zephirine and Calyste wish to reward me for doing my duty.  I was already well repaid by my own happiness in doing it.  I can never express the pleasure you have given me in that beautiful dressing-table, but when you are with me I shall try to do so.  Believe me, when I array myself before that treasure, I shall think, like the Roman matron, that my noblest jewel is our little angel, etc.

She directed the letter to Guerande and gave it to the footman to post.

When the Vicomtesse de Portenduere came, the shuddering chill of reaction had succeeded in poor Sabine this first paroxysm of madness.

“Ursula, I think I am going to die,” she said.

“What is the matter, dear?”

“Where did Savinien and Calyste go after they dined with you yesterday?”