light in the clouded sky. She thought it might be the beginning of dawn.
She looked at her watch. It was half-past three.

She returned to the window. The sombre infinity outdoors attracted her.
She looked. The sidewalks shone under the gas-jets. A gentle rain was
falling. Suddenly a voice ascended in the silence; acute, and then
grave, it seemed to be made of several voices replying to one another.
It--was a drunkard disputing with the beings of his dream, to whom he
generously gave utterance, and whom he confounded afterward with great
gestures and in furious sentences. Therese could see the poor man walk
along the parapet in his white blouse, and she could hear words recurring
incessantly: "That is what I say to the government."

Chilled, she returned to her bed. She thought, "He is jealous, he is
madly jealous. It is a question of nerves and of blood. But his love,
too, is an affair of blood and of nerves. His love and his jealousy are
one and the same thing. Another would understand. It would be
sufficient to please his self-love." But he was jealous from the depth
of his soul. She knew this; she knew that in him jealousy was a physical
torture, a wound enlarged by imagination. She knew how profound the evil
was. She had seen him grow pale before the bronze St. Mark when she had
thrown the letter in the box on the wall of the old Florentine house at a
time when she was his only in dreams.

She recalled his smothered complaints, his sudden fits of sadness, and
the painful mystery of the words which he repeated frequently: "I can
forget you only when I am with you." She saw again the Dinard letter and
his furious despair at a word overheard at a wine-shop table. She felt
that the blow had been struck accidentally at the most sensitive point,
at the bleeding wound. But she did not lose courage. She would tell