From that time forward, I often met Marguerite at the theatre or in
the Champs-Elysees. Always there was the same gaiety in her, the same
emotion in me.
At last a fortnight passed without my meeting her. I met Gaston and
asked after her.
"Poor girl, she is very ill," he answered.
"What is the matter?"
"She is consumptive, and the sort of life she leads isn't exactly the
thing to cure her. She has taken to her bed; she is dying."
The heart is a strange thing; I was almost glad at hearing it.
Every day I went to ask after her, without leaving my name or my card. I
heard she was convalescent and had gone to Bagneres.
Time went by, the impression, if not the memory, faded gradually from my
mind. I travelled; love affairs, habits, work, took the place of other
thoughts, and when I recalled this adventure I looked upon it as one of
those passions which one has when one is very young, and laughs at soon
afterward.
For the rest, it was no credit to me to have got the better of this
recollection, for I had completely lost sight of Marguerite, and, as I
told you, when she passed me in the corridor of the Varietes, I did not
recognise her. She was veiled, it is true; but, veiled though she might
have been two years earlier, I should not have needed to see her in
order to recognise her: I should have known her intuitively. All the
same, my heart began to beat when I knew that it was she; and the two
years that had passed since I saw her, and what had seemed to be the
results of that separation, vanished in smoke at the mere touch of her
dress.