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He was indeed quivering with hope and desire that Charles, the hateful Charles, the detested dead, had borne this shameful ridicule. And yet⁠—yet⁠—another emotion, less definite. “My dear little Made, tell me, I beg of you. He deserved it. You would have been wrong not to have given him a pair of horns. Come, Made, confess.”

She now, no doubt, found this persistence amusing, for she was laughing a series of short, jerky laughs.

He had put his lips close to his wife’s ear and whispered: “Come, come, confess.”

She jerked herself away, and said, abruptly: “You are crazy. As if one answered such questions.”

She said this in so singular a tone that a cold shiver ran through her husband’s veins, and he remained dumbfounded, scared, almost breathless, as though from some mental shock.

The carriage was now passing along the lake, on which the sky seemed to have scattered its stars. Two swans, vaguely outlined, were swimming slowly, scarcely visible in the shadow. George called out to the driver: “Turn back!” and the carriage returned, meeting the others going at a walk, with their lanterns gleaming like eyes in the night.

What a strange manner in which she had said it. Was it a confession? Du Roy kept asking himself. And the almost certainty that she had deceived her first husband now drove him wild with rage. He longed to beat her, to strangle her, to tear her hair out. Oh, if she had only replied: “But darling, if I had deceived him, it would have been with yourself,” how he would have kissed, clasped, worshiped her.