"Poor girl, she is very ill," he answered.

"What is the matter?"

"She is consumptive, and the sort of life she leads isn't exactly
the thing to cure her. She has taken to her bed; she is dying."

The heart is a strange thing; I was almost glad at hearing it.

Every day I went to ask after her, without leaving my name or my
card. I heard she was convalescent and had gone to Bagneres.

Time went by, the impression, if not the memory, faded gradually
from my mind. I travelled; love affairs, habits, work, took the
place of other thoughts, and when I recalled this adventure I
looked upon it as one of those passions which one has when one is
very young, and laughs at soon afterward.

For the rest, it was no credit to me to have got the better of
this recollection, for I had completely lost sight of Marguerite,
and, as I told you, when she passed me in the corridor of the
Varietes, I did not recognise her. She was veiled, it is true;
but, veiled though she might have been two years earlier, I
should not have needed to see her in order to recognise her: I
should have known her intuitively. All the same, my heart began
to beat when I knew that it was she; and the two years that had
passed since I saw her, and what had seemed to be the results of
that separation, vanished in smoke at the mere touch of her
dress.