She regained her calmness as though by magic, and she entered the garden and saw her husband in the distance. His dishevelled hair and disordered dress showed that he had not slept.
She gave him a letter with a broken seal but folded. As for him, without opening it, he gazed at his wife with the eyes of a madman.
"Here's an abominable thing," she said to him, "which an evil-looking man who makes out that he knows you and is under an obligation to you, handed to me as I was passing behind the notary's garden. I insist on one thing and that is that you send back this M. Julien to his parents and without delay." Madame de Rênal hastened to say these words, perhaps a little before the psychological moment, in order to free herself from the awful prospect of having to say them.
She was seize
