Tears and fainting! Would she--Andree-have given way like that in the same circumstances?
No.

But this girl--Delia--was of a different order: was that it?
All nerves and sentiment! At one of those lunches in the grand world she had seen a lady burst into tears suddenly at some one's reference to Senegal.

She herself had only cried four times, that she remembered; when her mother died; when her father was called a thief; when, one day, she suffered the first great shame of her life in the mountains of Auvergne; and the night when she waked a second time to her love for Gaston.

She dared to call it love, though good Annette had called it a mortal sin.
What was to be done?
The other woman must suffer.
The man was hers--hers for ever.

He had said it: for ever.