But she suddenly turned pale upon hearing that Monsieur de Rosas had left.

“What! gone?”

Gone thus, suddenly, unceremoniously, without notice, without a word?  It was not possible.

They were obliged to confirm this news to her several times at the hotel office.  Monsieur le duc had that very morning ordered a coupe to take him to catch a train for Calais.  It was true that he had left some baggage behind, but at the same time he notified them that they would perhaps have to forward it to him in England later.

Marianne listened in stupid astonishment.  She became livid under her little veil.

“Monsieur de Rosas did not receive a telegram?”

“Yes, madame.”

“Ah!”

Something serious had, perhaps, suddenly intervened in the duke’s life.  Nevertheless, this abrupt departure without notification, following the exciting soiree of the previous day, greatly astonished this woman who but now believed herself securely possessed of Jose.

“Nonsense!” she thought.  “He was afraid of me—­Yes, that’s it!—­Of course, he was afraid of me.  He loves me much, too much, and distrusts himself.  He has gone away.”

She commenced to laugh uneasily as she got into her carriage again.

“Assuredly, that is part of my fate.  That stupid Guy leaves for Italy.  Rosas leaves for England.  Steam was invented to admit of escape from dangerous women.  I did not follow Lissac.  What if I followed the duke?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and gnawed her cambric handkerchief under her veil, her head resting on the back of the coach, while the driver waited, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, ignorant of the direction in which the young woman wished to go.

Marianne felt herself beaten.  She was like a gambler who loses a decisive game.  Evidently, Rosas only showed more clearly by the action he had taken, how much he was smitten; she measured his love by her own dismay; but what was the good of that love, if the duke escaped in a cowardly fashion?—­But where could she find him?  Where follow him?  Where write to him?—­A man who runs about as he does!  A madman!  Perhaps on arriving at Dover he had already re-embarked for Japan or Australia.

“Ah! the unexpected happens, it seems,” thought Marianne, laughing maliciously, as she considered the ludicrousness of her failure.

“Madame, we are going—?” indifferently asked the coachman, who was tired of waiting.

“Where you please—­to the Bois!”

“Very good, madame.”

He looked at his huge aluminum watch, coolly remarking: 

“It was a quarter of twelve when I took Madame—­”

“Good! good!—­to the Bois!”

The movement of the carriage, the sight of the passers-by, the sunlight playing on the fountains and the paving-stones of the Place de la Concorde fully occupied Marianne’s mind, although irritating her at the same time.  All the cheerfulness attending the awakening spring, delightful as it is in Paris, seemed irony to her.  She felt again, but with increased bitterness, all the sentiments she experienced a few mornings previously when she called on Guy and told him of her burdensome weariness and distaste of life.  Of what use was she now?  She had just built so many fond dreams on hope!  And all her edifices had crumbled.