La Faloise meanwhile had heard the few rapid sentences thus whisperingly interchanged, and he gazed at Fauchery in hopes of an explanation which was not vouchsafed him.  Of whom were they talking, and what were they going to do at midnight tomorrow?  He did not leave his cousin’s side again.  The latter had gone and seated himself.  He was especially interested by the Countess Sabine.  Her name had often been mentioned in his presence, and he knew that, having been married at the age of seventeen, she must now be thirty-four and that since her marriage she had passed a cloistered existence with her husband and her mother-in-law.  In society some spoke of her as a woman of religious chastity, while others pitied her and recalled to memory her charming bursts of laughter and the burning glances of her great eyes in the days prior to her imprisonment in this old town house.  Fauchery scrutinized her and yet hesitated.  One of his friends, a captain who had recently died in Mexico, had, on the very eve of his departure, made him one of those gross postprandial confessions, of which even the most prudent among men are occasionally guilty.  But of this he only retained a vague recollection; they had dined not wisely but too well that evening, and when he saw the countess, in her black dress and with her quiet smile, seated in that Old World drawing room, he certainly had his doubts.  A lamp which had been placed behind her threw into clear relief her dark, delicate, plump side face, wherein a certain heaviness in the contours of the mouth alone indicated a species of imperious sensuality.

“What do they want with their Bismarck?” muttered La Faloise, whose constant pretense it was to be bored in good society.  “One’s ready to kick the bucket here.  A pretty idea of yours it was to want to come!”

Fauchery questioned him abruptly.

“Now tell me, does the countess admit someone to her embraces?”

“Oh dear, no, no!  My dear fellow!” he stammered, manifestly taken aback and quite forgetting his pose.  “Where d’you think we are?”

After which he was conscious of a want of up-to-dateness in this outburst of indignation and, throwing himself back on a great sofa, he added: 

“Gad!  I say no!  But I don’t know much about it.  There’s a little chap out there, Foucarmont they call him, who’s to be met with everywhere and at every turn.  One’s seen faster men than that, though, you bet.  However, it doesn’t concern me, and indeed, all I know is that if the countess indulges in high jinks she’s still pretty sly about it, for the thing never gets about—­nobody talks.”