Living like a cat shut into a lion's cage, the young wife dreaded at all hours the claws of the master which ever threatened her.

She knew that in order to be happy she must forget the past and think only of the future; but there were days, consecrated to the memory of some vanished joy, when she deliberately made it a crime to put on the gown she had worn on the day she had seen her lover for the first time.
"I am not guilty," she said, "but if I seem guilty to the count it is as if I were so.

Perhaps I am! The Holy Virgin conceived without--" She stopped.

During this moment when her thoughts were misty and her soul floated in a region of fantasy her naivete made her attribute to that last look with which her lover transfixed her the occult power of the visitation of the angel to the Mother of her Lord.

This supposition, worthy of the days of innocence to which her reverie had carried her back, vanished before the memory of a conjugal scene more odious than death.