Page:Short Story Classics (Foreign, Volume 4, French I, Collier, 1907).djvu/113

Rh step. I was appalled; I flung myself out of the room, followed even to the street door by shrieks that were like those cries of passion that come out of the caverns of the fallow deer.

"I stopped a moment under the portico to collect myself; I did not wish to venture into the street; with such confusion still in my soul I might not be able to find my way; I might, perhaps, be thrown under the wheels of some carriage I had not seen coming. I was as a drunken man might be who begins to recover sufficient reason in his clouded brain to recognize his condition, and who, feeling the will return but not the power, with fixed eyes and staring, leans motionless against some street post or some tree on the public promenade.

"At that moment a carriage stopped before the door, a woman alighted or rather shot herself from the doorway.

"She entered beneath the peristyle, turning her head from right to left like one who had lost her way; she was dressed in a black domino, had her face covered by a velvet mask. She presented herself at the door.

"'Your ticket,' said the door-keeper.

"'My ticket?' she replied. 'I have none.'

"'Then get one at the box-office.'

"The domino came back under the peristyle, fumbled nervously about in all her pockets.

"'No money!' she cried. 'Ah! this ring—a ticket of admission for this ring,' she said.

"'Impossible,' replied the woman who was