Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the

temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a

vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.

"Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me?

What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?"

She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with

flowing tears.

"Why don't you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in

during these crises.

"It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would

worry him."

"Ah! yes," Felicite went on, "you are just like La Guerine, Pere

Guerin's daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at

Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see her

standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a

winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was

a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do

anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went

off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his

rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle.

Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say."

"But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."




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