CHAPTER X.THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH.

There never had been any great sympathy between President Le Quesnoy and his son-in-law. The lapse of time, frequent intercourse and the bonds of relationship had not been able to narrow the gap between these two natures, or to vanquish the intimidating coolness which the Provençal felt in the presence of this big, silent man, with his pale and haughty face, from whose height a steely-gray look, which was the look of Rosalie without her tenderness and indulgence, fell upon his lively nature with freezing effect. Numa, with his mobile and floating nature, always overwhelmed by his own conversation, at one and the same time a fiery and a complicated nature, was in a state of constant revolt against the logic, the uprightness, the rigidity of his father-in-law. And while he envied him these qualities, he placed them to the credit of the coldness of nature in this man of the North, that extreme North which the President represented to him.

“Beyond him, there’s the wild polar bear—beyond that, nothing at all—the north pole and death.”

All the same he flattered the President, endeavored to cajole him with adroit, feline tricks, whichwere his baits to catch the Gaul. But the Gaul, subtler than he was himself, would not permit himself to be taken in, and on Sunday, in the dining-room at the Place Royale, at the moment when politics were discussed, whenever Numa, softened by the good dinner, attempted to make old Le Quesnoy believe that in reality the two were very close to an understanding, because both wanted the same thing, namely, liberty—it was a sight to see the indignant toss of the head with which the President penetrated his armor.

“Oh! Not at all, not the same by any means!”

In half-a-dozen clear-cut, hard arguments, he established the distances between them, unmasked fine phrases and showed that he was not the man to be taken in by their humbuggery. Then the lawyer got out of the affair by joking, though extremely angry at bottom and particularly on account of his wife, who looked on and listened without ever mixing herself up with political talk. But then in the evening, while going home in the carriage, he took great pains to prove to her that her father was lacking in common-sense. Ah! if it had not been for her presence, how finely he would have put the President to his trumps! In order not to irritate him, Rosalie avoided taking part with either.

“Yes, it is unfortunate—you don’t understand each other....” But in her own heart she agreed with the President.

When Roumestan arrived at a Minister’s portfolio the coolness between the two men only becamegreater. M. Le Quesnoy refused to show himself at his son-in-law’s receptions in the Rue de Grenelle and he explained the matter very precisely to his daughter.

“Now, please tell your husband this—let him continue to visit me here, and as often as possible; I shall be most delighted. But you must not expect ever to see me at the Ministry. I know well enough what those people are preparing for us: I don’t want to have the appearance of being an accomplice.”

After all, the situation between them was saved in the eyes of society by that heartfelt sorrow, that mourning of the heart, which had imprisoned the Le Quesnoys in their own home for so many years. Probably the Minister of Public Instruction would have been very much embarrassed to feel the presence in his drawing-room of that sturdy old contradictor, in whose presence he always remained a little boy. Still, he made believe to appear wounded by that decision; he struck an attitude on account of it, a thing which is very precious to an actor, and he found a pretext for not coming to the Sunday dinners except very irregularly, making as a plea one of those thousand excuses, engagements, meetings, political banquets, which offer so wide a liberty to husbands in politics.

Rosalie, on the contrary, never missed a Sunday, arriving early in the afternoon, delighted to find again in the home circle of her parents that taste of the family which her official life hardly permittedher the leisure to satisfy. Mme. Le Quesnoy being still at vespers and Hortense at church with her mother, or carried off to some musical matinée by friends, she was always certain to find her father in his library, a long room crammed from top to bottom with books. There he was, shut in with his silent friends, his intellectual intimates, the only ones with whom his sorrow had never found fault. The President did not seat himself to read; he passed the shelves in review, stopping in front of some finely bound books; standing there, unconscious what he did, he would read for an hour at a time without recognizing the passage of time or that he was weary. When he saw his eldest daughter enter, he would give a pale smile. After a few words were exchanged, because neither one nor the other was exactly garrulous, she also passed in review her beloved authors, choosing and turning over the leaves of some book in his immediate neighborhood in that somewhat dusky light of the big courtyard in the Marais, where the bells, sounding vespers near by, fell in heavy notes amidst the stillness that Sunday brings to the commercial quarters of a city. Sometimes he gave her an open book:

“Read that!” and put his finger under a passage; and when she had read it:

“That’s fine, is it not?”

There was no greater pleasure for that young woman, to whom life was offering whatever there was of brilliant and luxuriant things, than the hour passed beside that mournful and aged father inwhom her daughterly adoration was raised to a double power by other and intimate bonds altogether intellectual.

It was to him she owed the uprightness of her thought and that feeling for justice which made her so courageous; to him also her taste for the fine arts, her love of painting and of fine poetry—because with Le Quesnoy the continuous pettifoggery of the law had not succeeded in ossifying the man in him.

Rosalie loved her mother and venerated her, not without some little revolt against a nature which was too simple, too gentle, annihilated as it were in her own home; a nature which sorrow, that elevates certain souls, had crushed to the earth and forced into the most ordinary feminine occupations—into practical piety, into housekeeping in its smallest details. Although she was younger than her husband, she appeared to be the elder of the two, judged by her old woman’s talk; she was like one rendered old and sorrowful, who searched all the warm corners of her memory and all the souvenirs of her infancy in a land hot with the sun of Provence. But above all things the church had taken possession of her; since the death of her son she was in the habit of going to church in order to put her sorrow to slumber in the silent freshness and half-light and half-noise of the lofty naves, as though it were in the peace of a cloister barred by heavy double gates against the roar of the outer life. This she did with that devout and cowardly egotism of sorrows which kneel uponaprie-Dieuand are released from all anxieties and duties.

Rosalie, who was a young girl already at the moment of their mishap, had been struck by the very different way in which her parents suffered. Mme. Le Quesnoy, renouncing everything, was steeped in a tearful religion, but Le Quesnoy set out to obtain strength from daily work accomplished. Her tender preference for her father arose in her through the exercise of her reason. Marriage, life in common with all the exaggerations, lies and lunacies of her Southerner, caused her to feel the shelter of the silent library all the more pleasantly because it was a change from the grandiose, cold and official interior of the Ministry. In the midst of their quiet chat, the noise of a door was heard, a rustling of silk, and Hortense would enter.

“Ah, ha! I knew I should find you here!”

She did not love to read, Hortense did not. Even novels bored her; they were never romantic enough to suit her exalted frame of mind. After running up and down for about five minutes with her bonnet on, she would cry:

“How these old books and papers do smell stuffy! Don’t you find it so, Rosalie? Come on, come a little with me! Papa has had you long enough. Now it’s my turn.”

And so she would carry her off to her bedroom, their bedroom; for Rosalie also had used it until she was twenty years old.

There, during an hour of delightful chat, she saw about her all those things which had been apart of herself—her bed with cretonne curtains, her desk, her étagère, her library, where a bit of her childhood still lingered about the titles of the volumes and about the thousand childish things preserved with all due devotion. Here she found again her old thoughts lying about the corners of that young girl’s bedroom, more coquettish and ornamented, it is true, than it was in her time. There was a rug on the floor; a night lamp in the shape of a flower hung from the ceiling and fragile little tables stood about for sewing or writing, against which one knocked at every step; there was more elegance and less order. Two or three pieces of work begun were hanging over the backs of the chairs and the open desk showed a windy scattering of note-paper with monograms. When you entered there was always a minute or two of trouble.

“O, it’s the wind,” said Hortense with a peal of laughter. “The wind knows I adore him; he must have come to see if I was at home.”

“They must have left the window open,” answered Rosalie quietly. “How can you live in such an interior? For my part I am not able to think if anything is out of place.”

She rose to straighten the frame of a picture fastened to the wall; it irritated her eyes, which were as exact as her nature.

“O, well! it’s just the contrary with me. It puts me in form. It seems to me that I am travelling.”

This difference in their natures was reflectedon the faces of the two sisters. Rosalie had regular features with great purity in their lines, calm eyes of a color changing constantly like that of a deep lake; the other’s features were very irregular, her expression clever, her complexion the pale tint of a Creole woman. There were the North and the South in the father and the mother, two very different temperaments which had united without merging together; each was perpetuating its own race in one of the children, and all this, notwithstanding the life in common, the similar education in a great boarding-school for young girls, where, under the same masters, and only a few years later, Hortense was taking up the scholastic tradition which had made of her sister an attentive, serious woman, always ready to the minute, absorbed in her smallest acts. That same education had left her tumultuous, fantastic, unsteady of soul and always in a hurry. Sometimes, when she saw her so agitated, Rosalie cried out:

“I must say I am very lucky; I have no imagination.”

“As for me, I haven’t anything else,” said Hortense; and she reminded her how at boarding school, when M. Baudouy was given the task of teaching them style and the development of thought, during that course which he pompously termed his imagination class, Rosalie had never had any success, because she expressed everything in a few concise words, whereas she, on the other hand, given an idea as big as your nail, was able to blacken whole volumes with print.

“That’s the only prize I ever got—the imagination prize!”

Despite it all they were a tenderly united couple, bound to each other by one of those affections between an elder and a younger sister into which an element of the filial and maternal enters. Rosalie took her about with her everywhere, to balls, to her friends’ houses, on her shopping trips in which the taste of Parisian women is exercised; even after leaving the boarding-school she remained her younger sister’s little mother. And now she is occupying herself with getting her married, with finding for her some quiet and trustworthy companion, indispensable for such a madcap as she is, the powerful arm which is needed to offset her enthusiasms.

It was plain that the man she meant was Méjean; but Hortense, who at first did not say no, suddenly showed an evident antipathy. They had a long talk about it the day following the ministerial reception, when Rosalie had detected the emotion and trouble of her sister.

“O, he is kind and I like him well enough,” said Hortense, “he is one of those loyal friends such as one would like to have about one all one’s life; but that is not the sort of husband that will do for me.”

“Why?”

“You will laugh at me. He does not appeal to my imagination enough; there it is! A marriage with him—why it makes me think of the house of a burgher, right-angled and stiff, at the end of analley of trees which stand as straight as the letter I; and you know well enough that I love something else—the unexpected, surprises—”

“Well, who then? M. de Lappara?”

“Thank you! In order that I should be just a wee bit preferred to his tailor?”

“M. de Rochemaure?”

“What, that model red-tapist?—and I who have a perfect horror of red tape!”

And when the disquiet which Rosalie showed pushed her to the wall, for she wished to know everything and interrogated her closely:

“What I should like to do,” said the young girl, while a faint flame like a fire in straw rose into the pallor of her complexion, “what I should like to do—” Then in a changed voice and with an expression of fun:

“I should like to marry Bompard! Yes, Bompard; he is the husband of my dreams—at any rate he has imagination, that fellow, and some resources against deadly dulness!”

She rose to her feet and passed up and down the room with that gait, a little inclined over, which made her seem even taller than her figure warranted. People did not recognize Bompard’s worth; but what pride and what dignity of existence were his, and, with all his craziness, what logic!

“Numa wanted to give him a place in the office close to him; but he would not take it, he preferred to live in honor of his chimera. And people actually accuse the South of France ofbeing practical and industrious!—but there is the man to give that legend the lie. Why, look here—he was telling me this the other night at the ball—he is going to brood out ostrich eggs—an artificial brood machine—he is positive that he will make millions,—and he is far more happy than if he had those millions! Why, it is a perpetual life in fairy-land with a man of that sort. Let them give me Bompard; I want nobody but Bompard!”

“Well, well, I see I shall learn nothing more to-day either,” said the big sister to herself, who divined underneath these lively sallies something deep down below.

One Sunday when she reached her old home Rosalie found Mme. Le Quesnoy awaiting her in the vestibule, who told her with an air of mystery:

“There’s somebody in the drawing-room—a lady from the South.”

“Aunt Portal?”

“You shall see—”

It was not Mme. Portal, but a saucy Provençal girl whose deep curtsy in the rustic way came to an end in a peal of laughter.

“Hortense!”

Her skirt reaching to the tops of her black shoes, her waist increased by the folds of tulle belonging to the big scarf, her face framed among the falling waves of hair kept in place by a little bonnet made of cut velvet and embroidered with butterflies in jet, Hortense looked very like thechatoswhom one sees on Sunday practising theircoquetries on the Tilting Field at Arles, or else walking, two and two, with lowered lashes, through the pretty columns of St. Trophyme cloisters, whose denticulated architecture goes very well with those ruddy Saracen reds and with the ivory color of the church in which a flame of a consecrated candle trembles in the full daylight.

“Just see how pretty she is!” said her mother, standing in ecstasy before that lively personification of the land of her youthful days. Rosalie, on the other hand, shuddered with an inexplicable sadness, as if that costume had taken her sister far, far away from her.

“Well, that is a fantastic idea! It is very becoming to you, but I like you far better as a Parisian girl. And who dressed you so well?”

“Audiberte Valmajour. She has just gone out.”

“How often she comes here!” said Rosalie, going into their room to take off her bonnet. “What a friendship it is! I shall begin to get jealous.”

Hortense excused herself, a little bit embarrassed; this head-dress from Provence gave so much pleasure to their mother in the sober house.

“Is it not true, mother?” cried she, going from one room into the other. “Besides, that poor girl feels so outlandish in Paris and is so interesting with her blind devotion to the genius of her brother.”

“Oh! Genius, is it?” said the big sister, tossing her head a bit.

“What! You saw it yourself the other night at your house, the effect it produced—everywhere just the same thing!”

And when Rosalie answered that one must estimate at their real value these successes won in the world of society and due to politeness, a caprice of an evening, the last fad:

“Well, I don’t care, he is in the opera!”

The velvet band on the little head-dress bristled up in sign of revolt, as if it were really covering one of those enthusiastic heads above whose profile it floats, down there in Provence. Besides, the Valmajours were not peasants like others, but the last remnants of a reduced family of nobles.

Rosalie, standing in front of the tall mirror, turned about laughing:

“What! You believe in that legend?”

“Why, of course I do. They descend in direct line from the Princes des Baux. There are the parchments and there are the coats of arms at their rustic doorway. Any day that they should wish—”

Rosalie shuddered. Behind the peasant who played the flute there was the prince besides. Given a strong imagination—and that might become dangerous.

“None of that story is true,” and this time she did not laugh any more. “In the district of Aps there are ten families bearing that so-called princely name. Anybody who told you otherwise told a falsehood through vanity or through—”

“But it was Numa—it was your husband. Theother night at the Ministry he gave us all sorts of details.”

“O! You know how it is with him—you have got to consider the focus, as he says himself.”

Hortense was not listening. She had gone back into the drawing-room, and, seated at the piano, she began in a loud voice:

“Mount’ as passa ta matinado,Mourbieù, Marioun....”

“Mount’ as passa ta matinado,

Mourbieù, Marioun....”

It was an old popular ballad of Provence, sung to an air as grave as a church recitative, that Numa had taught his sister-in-law; one that he enjoyed hearing her sing with her Parisian accent, which, sliding over the Southern articulations, made one think of Italian spoken by an Englishwoman.

“Où as-tu passé ta matinée, morbleu, Marion?A la fontaine chercher de l’eau, mon Dieu, mon ami.Quel est celui qui te parlait, morbleu, Marion?C’est une de mes camarades, mon Dieu, mon ami.Les femmes ne portent pas les brayes, morbleu, Marion.C’est sa robe entortillée, mon Dieu, mon ami.Les femmes ne portent pas l’épée, morbleu, Marion.C’est sa quenouille qui pendait, mon Dieu, mon ami.Les femmes ne portent pas les moustaches, morbleu, Marion.C’est des mûres qu’elle mangeait, mon Dieu, mon ami.Le mois de mai ne porte pas de mûres, morbleu, Marion.C’était une branche de l’automne, mon Dieu, mon ami.Va m’en chercher une assiettée, morbleu, Marion.Les petits oiseaux les ont toutes mangées, mon Dieu, mon ami.Marion! ... je te couperai ta tête, morbleu, Marion.Et puis que ferez-vous du reste, mon Dieu, mon ami?Je le jetterai par la fenêtre, morbleu, Marion,Les chiens, les chats en feront fête....”

“Où as-tu passé ta matinée, morbleu, Marion?

A la fontaine chercher de l’eau, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Quel est celui qui te parlait, morbleu, Marion?

C’est une de mes camarades, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Les femmes ne portent pas les brayes, morbleu, Marion.

C’est sa robe entortillée, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Les femmes ne portent pas l’épée, morbleu, Marion.

C’est sa quenouille qui pendait, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Les femmes ne portent pas les moustaches, morbleu, Marion.

C’est des mûres qu’elle mangeait, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Le mois de mai ne porte pas de mûres, morbleu, Marion.

C’était une branche de l’automne, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Va m’en chercher une assiettée, morbleu, Marion.

Les petits oiseaux les ont toutes mangées, mon Dieu, mon ami.

Marion! ... je te couperai ta tête, morbleu, Marion.

Et puis que ferez-vous du reste, mon Dieu, mon ami?

Je le jetterai par la fenêtre, morbleu, Marion,

Les chiens, les chats en feront fête....”

She interrupted herself in order to fling out his words with the gesture and intonation that Numa used when he got excited. “There, look you, me children! ’tis as foine as Shakespeare.”

“Yes, a picture of manners and customs,” said Rosalie, coming up to her, “the husband gross and brutal, the wife catlike and mendacious—a true household in Provence!”

“Oh, my dear child,” said Mme. Le Quesnoy, in a tone of gentle reproof, the tone that is used when ancient quarrels have become the habit. The piano-stool whisked quickly around and brought face to face with Rosalie the cap of the furious little Provence girl.

“’Tis really too much! what harm has it ever done to you, our South? as for me, I adore it! I did not know it at the time, but that voyage you made me take revealed to me my real country. It is no use to have been baptized at St. Paul’s; I belong down there, I do—I am a child of the ‘little square.’ Do you know, Mamma, some one of these days we will just leave these cold Northerners planted right here, and we two will go down to live in our beautiful South, where people sing and dance—the South of the winds, of the sun, of the mirage, of everything that makes one poetic and widens one’slife—

‘It is there I would wish to dw-e-e-ll.’”

Her two agile hands fell back upon the piano, scattering the end of her dream in a tumult of resounding notes.

“And not one word about the tabor-player!” thought Rosalie. “That’s a serious thing!”

It was a good deal more serious than she imagined.

From the day when Audiberte had seen Mlle. Le Quesnoy fasten a flower on the tabor of her brother, from that very moment there arose in her ambitious soul a splendid vision of the future, which had not been without its effect on their transplantation to Paris. The reception which Hortense gave her, when she came to complain about her brother’s obstination in running after Numa, defined and strengthened her in her still vague hope. And since then, gradually, without opening her mind to her men-folks otherwise than through half words, she prepared the path with the duplicity of the peasant woman who is nearly an Italian, gliding and crawling forward. From her seat in the kitchen in the Place Royale, where she began by waiting timidly in a corner on the edge of a chair, she crept into the drawing-room and installed herself, always neat and trig, in the position of a poor relation.

Hortense was crazy about her, showed her to her friends as if she were a pretty piece of bric-à-brac brought from that land of Provence which she always spoke of with enthusiasm. And the other girl played herself off as more simple than nature allows, exaggerated her savage rages, her tirades of wrath with clenched fist against the muddy sky of Paris, and would often use a charming little exclamation,Boudiou, the effect of whichshe arranged and watched like a kittenish girl on the stage. The President himself had smiled at thisBoudiou, and just to think of having made the President smile!

But it was in the young girl’s bedroom, when they were alone, that she put all her tricks in play. All of a sudden she would kneel at her feet, would seize her hand, go into ecstasies over the smallest points of her toilet, her way of making a bow in a ribbon, her manner of dressing her hair, letting slip those heavy compliments directly in her face, which give great pleasure all the same, so spontaneous and naïve do they appear.

Oh, when the young lady stepped out of the carriage in front of themas[the farm-house], she thought she saw the queen of the angels in person! and she was for a time speechless at the sight, and her brother,pécaïré, when he heard on the stones of the descending road the noise of the carriage which took back the little Parisian, he said it was as if those stones, one by one, were falling on his heart. She played a great rôle with regard to this brother, his pride and his anxieties—his anxieties, now why? I just ask you why—since that reception at the “Menistry” he was being talked about in all the papers and his portrait was seen everywhere and such invitations as he got in the Faubourg Saint-Germoine—why he couldn’t meet them all! Duchesses, countesses, wrote him notes on splendid paper—they had coronets on their letters just like those on the carriages which they sent to bring him in; andstill—well, no, he wasn’t happy, the “pore” man! All these things whispered in Hortense’s ear gave her some share of the fever and magnetic will-power of the peasant girl. Then, without looking at Audiberte, she asked if perhaps Valmajour did not have down there in Provence a betrothed who was waiting for him.

“He a betrothed?—avaï!you do not know him—he has much too much belief in himself to desire a peasant girl. The richest girls have been on his track, the Des Combette girl, and then still another, and a lot of gay ladies—you know what I mean! He did not even look at them. Who knows what it is he is revolving in his head? Oh, these artists—”

And that word, a new one for her, assumed on her ignorant lips an expression hard to define, somewhat like the Latin spoken at mass, or some cabalistic formula picked up in a book of magic. The heritage which would come from Cousin Puyfourcat returned again and again during the course of this adroit gossip.

There are very few families in the South of France, whether artisans or burghers, who do not possess a Cousin Puyfourcat, an adventurer who has departed in early youth in search of fortune and has never written since, whom they love to imagine enormously rich. He is like a lottery ticket running for an indefinite time, a chimerical vista opening up fortune and hope in the distance, which at last they end by taking for a fact. Audiberte believed firmly in the fortune of that cousinand she talked about it to the young girl, less for the purpose of dazzling her than in order to diminish the social gap which separated them. When Puyfourcat should die, her brother was to buy Valmajour back again, cause the castle to be rebuilt and his patent of nobility acknowledged, because everybody said that the necessary papers were extant.

At the close of such chats as these, which were sometimes prolonged deep into the twilight, Hortense remained for a long time silent, her forehead pressed against the pane, and saw the high towers of that reconstructed castle as they lifted themselves in the rose-colored winter sunset, the terrace shining with torches and resounding with concerts in honor of the chatelaine.

“Boudiou, how late it is,” cried the peasant girl, seeing that she had brought her to the point where she desired, “and the dinner for my men is not ready yet! I must fly!”

Very often Valmajour came and waited for her downstairs; but she never allowed him to come upstairs. She felt that he was so awkward and coarse, and cold, besides, toward any idea of flattering. She had no use for him yet.

Somebody who was very much in her way, too, but difficult to escape, was Rosalie, with whom her feline ways and her false innocency did not take at all. In her presence Audiberte, her terrible black brows knit across her forehead, did not say a single word; and in that Southern silence there rose up along with the racial hatred that anger ofthe weak person, underhand and vindictive, which turns against the obstacle most dangerous to its projects. Her real grievance was Rosalie, but she talked about quite other ones to her little sister. For example, Rosalie did not like tabor-playing; then “she did not do her religious duties—and a woman who does not do her religion, you know....” Audiberte did her religion and in the most tremendous way; she never missed a single mass and she went to communion on the proper days. But all that did not hinder in any way her actions; intriguer, liar and hypocrite as she was, violent to the verge of crime, she drew from the Bible texts nothing but excuses for vengeance and hatred. Only she kept her honor in the feminine sense of the word. With her twenty-eight years and her pretty face, in those low quarters where the Valmajours were moving nowadays, she preserved the severe chastity of her thick peasant’s scarf, bound about a heart which had never beat with any emotion beside ambition for her brother.

“Hortense makes me anxious—look at her there.”

Rosalie, to whom her mother whispered this confidentially in a corner of the drawing-room at the Ministry, thought that Mme. Le Quesnoy shared her own anxiety, but the observation made by the mother referred merely to the physical condition of Hortense, who had not been able to cure herself of a bad cold. Rosalie looked at her sister; always the same dazzling complexion, livelinessand gayety; she coughed a little, but what of that? only as all Parisian girls do after the ball season! The summer would certainly put her back again in good shape very quickly.

“And have you spoken to Jarras about her?”

Jarras was a friend of Roumestan, one of the old boys of the Café Malmus. He assured her that it was nothing and suggested a course at the waters of Arvillard.

“All right, then; you must get off quickly,” said Rosalie with vivacity, delighted with this pretext of getting Hortense away.

“Yes, but there is your father, who would be alone—”

“I will go and see him every day—”

Then, sobbing, the poor mother acknowledged the horror which such a trip with her daughter caused her. During an entire year it had been necessary for her to run from one watering place to another for the sake of the child they had already lost. Was it possible that she would have to begin again the same pilgrimage, with the same frightful results in prospect? And the other, too,—the disease had seized him at the age of twenty, in his full health, in his fullpowers—

“Oh Mamma, do be quiet!”

And Rosalie scolded her gently: Come, now; Hortense was not ill; the doctor said that the trip would only be a pleasure party; Arvillard, in the Alps of Dauphiny, was a marvellous country; she herself would like nothing better than to accompany Hortense in her mother’s place;unfortunately, she could not do it. Reasons mostserious—

“Yes, yes. I understand—your husband, the Ministry—”

“O, no. It isn’t that at all!”

And to her mother, in that nearness of heart which they so seldom found affecting them: “Listen, then, but for you alone—nobody knows it, not even Numa ...” she acknowledged a still very fragile hope of a great happiness which she had quite despaired of, the happiness which made her wild with joy and fear, the entirely new hope of a baby who might perhaps be born to them.

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