At the noise made by the opening of the antechamber door, Boleslas started up.

He seized both hands of the man into whose apartments he had obtruded himself.

He pressed them.

He gazed at him with feverish eyes, with eyes which had not closed for hours, and he murmured, drawing the novelist into the tiny salon: "You have come, Julien, you are here! Ah, I thank you for having answered my call at once! Let me look at you, for I am sure I have a friend beside me, one in whom I can trust, with whom I can speak frankly, upon whom I can depend.

If this solitude had lasted much longer I should have become mad." Although Madame Steno's lover belonged to the class of excitable, nervous people who exaggerate their feelings by an unconscious wildness of tone and of manner, his face bore the traces of a trouble too deep not to be startling.
Julien, who had seen him set out, three months before, so radiantly handsome, was struck by the change which had taken place during such a brief absence.