Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/129



have been told in a less brutal fashion? You have acted like a fiend!—not like a man! If Silvion Guidèl be a vile seducer, and that poor child Pauline his credulous, ruined victim, could you not have dealt with him and have spared her? God! I would as soon wring the neck of a bird that trusted me, as add any extra weight to the sorrows of an already broken-hearted woman!"

More than this, the indignant old man gives his son a substantial sum of money, and turns him out of his house.

Pauline, too, leaves her home in a mysterious and sudden fashion, without telling any one where she is going. The death of her father, M. de Charmilles, quickly follows. Beauvais drinks himself stupid every night, and spends his days doggedly hunting for Pauline, who, he feels sure, has hidden herself in the loathsome slums in which Paris abounds. And in time he does meet her, but long before this he encounters her seducer, Silvion Guidèl, and, after a mad struggle, throttles him, and casts the corpse into the Seine.

The murder is not traced home to Beauvais, who drinks more deeply than ever of the deadly absinthe, and becomes more surely its slave with every draught. Gessonex, the disreputable artist who introduced him to this form of vice, ends his failure of a career by shooting himself on the pave