curtains closed, lying there in the soft half-light that was soothing to
her nerves. The silence was broken at intervals by the voice of Modeste,
who would come and offer her her medicine. When Jacqueline had taken it,
she would shut her eyes, and resume, half asleep, her sad reflections.
These were always the same. What could be the tie between her stepmother
and Marien?

She tried to recall all the proofs of friendship she had seen pass
between them, but all had taken place openly. Nothing that she could
remember seemed suspicious. So she thought at first, but as she thought
more, lying, feverish, upon her bed, several things, little noticed at
the time, were recalled to her remembrance. They might mean nothing, or
they might mean much. In the latter case, Jacqueline could not
understand them very well. But she knew he had called her "Clotilde,"
that he had even dared to say "thou" to her in private--these were things
she knew of her own knowledge. Her pulse beat quicker as she thought of
them; her head burned. In that studio, where she had passed so many
happy hours, had Marien and her stepmother ever met as lovers?

Her stepmother and Marien! She could not understand what it meant.
Must she apply to them a dreadful word that she had picked up in the
history books, where it had been associated with such women as Margaret
of Burgundy, Isabeau of Bavaria, Anne Boleyn, and other princesses of
very evil reputation? She had looked it out in the dictionary, where the
meaning given was: "To be unfaithful to conjugal vows." Even then she
could not understand precisely the meaning of adultery, and she set
herself to solve it during the long lonely days when she was
convalescent. When she was able to walk from one room to another, she
wandered in a loose dressing-gown, whose long, lank folds showed that she
had grown taller and thinner during her illness, into the room that held