She commenced to laugh nervously, and said: 

“That one isn’t afraid.”

She threw him a morsel that he swallowed with a greedy gulp.

“Do you know, Monsieur le Ministre, that the story of these ducks is that of the human species?  There are some that have got nothing of all the bread that I have thrown them, and there are others who have gorged enough to kill them with indigestion.  How would you classify that?  Poor political economy.”

“Oh, oh!” said Vaudrey.  “You are wandering into the realms of lofty philosophy!—­”

“Apropos of that, yes,” said Marianne, as she pointed to the line of birds that hurried on all sides, left the water, waddled about, uttering their noisy cries.  “You know that when one is sad, one philosophizes anent everything.”

“And you are sad?” asked Sulpice, in a voice that certainly quivered slightly.

She threw away, without breaking it, the piece of bread that was left, brushed her gloved fingers, and, turning toward the minister, said with a smile that would make the flesh creep: 

“Very sad.  Oh! what would you have?  The black butterflies, you know, the blue devils.”

He saw her again, just as she had appeared before him yesterday, with arms and shoulders bare, lovely and seductive, and now, with her shoulders hidden under her cloak, her face half-veiled and quite pale, he thought her still more disquietingly charming.  Moreover, the strangeness of the situation, the chance meeting, imparted something of mystery to their conversation and the attraction of an assignation.

Ah! how happy he felt at having desired to breathe the air of the Bois!  It now seemed to him that he had only come there for her sake.  Once more it appeared to him that some magnetic thought led to this deserted spot these two beings, who but yesterday had only exchanged commonplace remarks and who, in this sunbathed solitude, under these trees, in the fresh breeze of the departing winter, met again, impelled toward each other, drawn on by the same sympathy.

“Do you know what I was thinking of?” she said, smiling graciously.  “Yes, of what I was thinking as I cast the brown bread to those ducks?  An idyll, is it not?  Well!  I was thinking that if one dared—­a quick plunge into such a sheet of water—­very pure—­quite tempting—­Eh! well! it would end all.”

Vaudrey did not reply.  He looked at her stupidly, his glance betraying the utmost anxiety.

“Oh! fear nothing,” she said.  “A whim! and besides, I can swim better than the swans, there is no danger.”

He had seized her hands instinctively and he experienced a singular delight in feeling the flesh of Marianne’s wrists under his fingers.

“You are feverish,” he said.

“I should be, at any rate.”

Her voice was still harsh, as if she were distressed.

“The departure of—­of that friend—­has, then, caused you much suffering?”