“Suffering?  No.  Vexation, yes—­You have built many castles of cards in your life—­Come! how stupid I am!” she said bitterly.  “You still build many of them.  Well! there it is, you see!”

She had withdrawn her hands from Sulpice, and walked away slowly from the border of the lake, going toward the end of the path where her coachman awaited her, his eyes closed and his mouth open.

“Where are you going on leaving the Bois?” asked Vaudrey.

“I?  I don’t know.”

He had made a movement.

“Oh! once more I tell you, don’t be afraid,” she said.  “I want to live.  Fear nothing, I will go home, parbleu.”

“Home?”

“Or to my uncle’s.”

“But, really, Monsieur le Ministre,” she said, “you are taking upon yourself the affairs of Monsieur Jouvenet, your Prefect of Police.  I know him well, and certainly he asks fewer questions than Your Excellency.”

“That, perhaps,” said Vaudrey, with a smile, “is because he has less anxiety about you than I have.”

“Ah! bah!” said Marianne.

She had by this time got close to her hackney coach and looked at the coachman for a moment.  “Don’t you think it would be very wrong to waken him?” she said.  “Will you accompany me for a moment, Monsieur le Ministre?”

Vaudrey paled slightly, divining under this question a seductive prospect.

Marianne’s gray eyes were never turned from him.

They walked along slowly, followed by the coupe whose lengthened shadow was projected in front of them along the yellow pathway, moving beside the lake where the swans floated with their pure white wings extended and striking the water with their feet, raising all around them a white foam, like snow falling in flakes.  The blue heavens were reflected in the water.  The grass, of a burnt-green, almost gray color, looked like worn velvet here and there, showing the weft and spotted with earth.

Side by side they walked, Vaudrey earnestly watching Marianne, while she gazed about her and pointed out to him the gray, winter-worn rocks, the smooth ivy, and on the horizon some hinds browsing, in the far distance, as in a desert, the bare grass as yellow as ripe wheat, around a pond, in a gloomy landscape, russet horizons against a pale sky, presenting a forlorn, mysterious and fleeting aspect.

“One would think one’s self at the end of the world,” said Sulpice, with lowered voice and troubled heart.

A slight laugh from Marianne was her only reply, as she pointed with the tip of her finger to an inscription on a sign: 

“To Croix-Catelan!” she said.  “That end of the world is decidedly Parisian!”

“Nevertheless, see how isolated we are to-day.”

It seemed as if she had divined his thought, for she took a path that skirted a road and there, in the narrowest strip of soft, fresh soil, on which the tiny heels of her boots made imprints like kisses upon a cheek, she walked in front of him, the shadows of the small branches dappling her black dress, while Vaudrey, deeply moved, still looked at her, framed as she was by trees with moss-covered trunks and surrounded with brambles, a medley of twisted branches.