167
could I suspect the man I loved of infidelity. I shrank from such a supposition as from something heinous—from a kind of moral pollution. No, it must be anything else but that. The key of the door downstairs was in my hand, I was already in the house.
"I crept stealthily upstairs, in the dark, thinking of the first night I had accompanied my friend there, thinking how we had stopped to kiss and hug each other at every step.
"But now, without my friend, the darkness was weighing upon me, overpowering, crushing me. I was at last on the landing of the entresol where my friend lived; the whole house was perfectly quiet.
"Before putting in the key, I looked through the hole. Had Teleny, or his servant, left the gas lighted in the antechamber and in one of the rooms?
"Then the remembrance of the broken mirror came into my mind; all kinds of horrible thoughts flitted through my brain. Then, again, in spite of myself, the awful apprehension of having been