Who on his side left her alone.
But the last hour had wrought a change. Her eyes were grown restless,
her colour came and went. The past stirred in its shallow--ah, so
shallow--grave; and dead hopes and dead forebodings, strive as she might,
thrust out hands to plague and torment her. If the man who sought to
speak with her by stealth, who dogged her footsteps and hung on the
skirts of her party, were Tignonville--her lover, who at his own request
had been escorted to the Arsenal before their departure from Paris--then
her plight was a sorry one. For what woman, wedded as she had been
wedded, could think otherwise than indulgently of his persistence? And
yet, lover and husband! What peril, what shame the words had often
spelled! At the thought only she trembled and her colour ebbed. She
saw, as one who stands on the brink of a precipice, the depth which
yawned before her. She asked herself, shivering, if she would ever sink
to _that_.
All the loyalty of a strong nature, all the virtue of a good woman,
revolted against the thought. True, her husband--husband she must call
him--had not deserved her love; but his bizarre magnanimity, the gloomy,
disdainful kindness with which he had crowned possession, even the unity
of their interests, which he had impressed upon her in so strange a
fashion, claimed a return in honour.
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