“Oh!  I pray you, answer me.  One word, one only.  Are you going to get married?”

“Yes, perhaps.  What concern is it of yours?” she retorted, in a tone of icy indifference.

He made a passionate gesture, and exclaimed: 

“It is impossible!”

“Why should it be?” she asked, still keeping her eyes fixed on his face.

Her glance stayed the words upon his lips, and he was forced to silence.  For a moment longer he remained near her, pressing his hands to his brow, and then fled away, with a feeling of suffocation in his throat, dreading lest he might give expression to his despair; while she, with assumed tranquillity, once more turned to her work.

But the spell of those delicious afternoons was gone.  Next day shone fair and sunny, and Helene seemed ill at ease from the moment she found herself alone with him.  The pleasant intimacy, the happy trustfulness, which sanctioned their sitting side by side in blissful security, and revelling in the unalloyed joy of being together, no longer existed.  Despite his intense carefulness to give her no cause for alarm, he would sometimes gaze at her and tremble with sudden excitement, while his face crimsoned with a rush of blood.  From her own heart had fled its wonted happy calm; quivers ran through her frame; she felt languid; her hands grew weary, and forsook their work.

She now no longer allowed Jeanne to wander from her side.  Between himself and her the doctor found this constant onlooker, watching him with large, clear eyes.  But what pained Helene most was that she now felt ill at ease in Madame Deberle’s company.  When the latter returned of an afternoon, with her hair swept about by the wind, and called her “my dear” while relating the incidents of some shopping expedition, she no longer listened with her former quiet smile.  A storm arose from the depths of her soul, stirring up feelings to which she dared not give a name.  Shame and spite seemed mingled in them.  However, her honorable nature gained the mastery, and she gave her hand to Juliette, but without being able to repress the shudder which ran through her as she pressed her friend’s warm fingers.

The weather had now broken up.  Frequent rain forced the ladies to take refuge in the Japanese pavilion.  The garden, with its whilom exquisite order, became transformed into a lake, and no one dared venture on the walks, on account of the mud.  However, whenever the sun peeped out from behind the clouds, the dripping greenery soon dried; pearls hung from each little blossom of the lilac trees; and under the elms big drops fell splashing on the ground.

“At last I’ve arranged it; it will be on Saturday,” said Madame Deberle one day.  “My dear, I’m quite tired out with the whole affair.  Now, you’ll be here at two o’clock, won’t you?  Jeanne will open the ball with Lucien.”

And thereupon, surrendering to a flow of tenderness, in ecstasy over the preparations for her ball, she embraced both children, and, laughingly catching hold of Helene, pressed two resounding kisses on her cheeks.