How can I help being excited," rejoined Anne Mie with quaint, pathetic gentleness, "when I speak of such base treachery, as that which Merlin has suggested ?" "Well?
And what did he suggest ?" "He did more than suggest," whispered Anne Mie almost inaudibly; "he gave me this paper--the anonymous denunciation which reached the Public Prosecutor this morning--he thought one of us might recognise the handwriting." Then she paused, some five steps away from Deroulede, holding out towards him the crumpled paper, which up to now she had clutched determinedly in her hand.

Deroulede was about to take it from her, and just before he had turned to do so, his eyes lighted on Juliette.
She said nothing, she had merely risen instinctively, and had reached Anne Mie's side in less than the fraction of a second.
It was all a flash, and there was dead silence in the room, but in that one-hundredth part of a second, Deroulede had read guilt in the face of Juliette.
It was nothing but instinct, a sudden, awful, unexplainable revelation.
Her soul seemed suddenly to stand before him in all its misery and in all its sin.
It was if the fire from heaven had descended in one terrific crash, burying beneath its devastating flames his ideals, his happiness, and his divinity.

She was no longer there.

His madonna had ceased to be.
There stood before him a beautiful woman, on whom he had lavished all the pent-up treasures of his love, whom he had succoured, sheltered, and protected, and who had repaid him thus.
She had forced an entry into his house; she had spied upon him, dogged him, lied to him.

The moment was too sudden, too awful for him to make even a wild guess at her motives.