troubled themselves no further respecting herself or her antecedents. The
lapse of time had brought no improvement to her spirits; indeed, Gustave,
who watched her closely, perceived that she had grown paler and thinner
since that March morning when he met her in the public garden. Her life
must have been painfully monotonous. She very rarely went out of doors,
and on no occasion ventured beyond the gardens of the Luxembourg. No one
visited her. She neither wrote nor received any letters. She was wont to
make a pretence of reading as she sat in her retired corner of the salon;
but Gustave had discovered that she gave little attention to her book.
The open volume in her hand seemed no more than an excuse for brooding
upon her sorrows.

If people, prompted by curiosity or by compassion, endeavoured to get
into conversation with this lonely lady, the result was always the same.
She would answer their questions in a low gentle voice, with a quiet
politeness; but she never assisted them in the smallest degree to
interchange thoughts with her. It seemed as if she sought neither friend
nor sympathizer, or as if her case was so entirely hopeless as to admit
of neither. She paid for her board and lodging weekly with a punctilious
exactness, though weekly payments were not the rule of the house.

"My movements are uncertain," she said to Madame Magnotte. "I cannot
tell how long I may be with you. It will therefore be better for me to
pay you weekly."

She had been in the house two months, dining every day at the public
table, spending all her evenings in the public saloon; and during that
time her settled gloom had never been broken by any outburst of grief or
passion. She might have been a creature of ice, a statue of despair
modelled in snow by a Michael Angelo. But one night the ice melted, the