In these last words, there was a certain tenderness that in a measure modified the expression of weariness or sulkiness which Marianne suggested.  Sulpice inferred therefrom an implied acceptance of his proffered love.

“Yes,” said she abruptly; “I am very sad, frightfully sad.”

“Without a cause?” asked Vaudrey.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh!  I am not of those who allow their nerves to control them.  When I am out of sorts, there is invariably a cause.  Let that be understood once for all.”

“And the cause?—­I should be delighted to learn it, Marianne, for I swear to you that I would always bear a half of your troubles and pains.”

“Thanks!—­But in life there are troubles so commonplace that one could only acknowledge them to the most intimate friends.”

“You have no more devoted friend than I am,” replied Vaudrey, in a tone that conveyed unmistakable conviction.

She knew it positively.  She could read that heart like an open page.

“When one meets friends like you, one is the more solicitous to keep them and to avoid saddening them with stupid affairs.”

“But why?” asked Vaudrey, drawing close to Marianne.  “What troubles you?  I beseech you to tell me!”

He gazed earnestly at her eyes, seeking in the depths of their blue pupils a secret or a confession that evaded him, and with an instinctive movement he seized Marianne’s hands which she abandoned to him; they were quite cold.  As he bent toward her to plead with her to speak, he felt her gentle breath, inhaled the perfume of her delicate, fair skin, and saw the exquisite curves of her body outlined beneath the black folds of her satin peignoir.  Marianne’s knee gently pressed his own while her heavy eyelids fell like veils over the young woman’s eyes, in which Vaudrey thought he observed tears.

“Marianne, I entreat you, if you have any sorrow whatever, that I can assuage, I pray you, tell me of it!”

“Eh! if it were a sorrow!—­” she said, quickly withdrawing her left hand from Sulpice’s warm grasp.  “But it is worse:  it is a financial worry, yes, financial,” she said brusquely, on observing that Vaudrey’s face depicted astonishment.

She seized the handful of papers that she had thrown into the work-basket, and said in a tone that was expressive of mingled wrath and disgust: 

“There now, you see that?  They are bills for this house:  the accounts of clamorous creditors, upholsterers, locksmiths, builders and I don’t know what besides!”

“What! your house?”

“You thought that I had paid for it?  It is a rented one and nothing in it is paid for.  I owe for all, and to a hungry pack.”

She began to laugh.

“Do you imagine then that old Kayser’s niece could lead this life in which you see her?  Without a sou, should I possess all that you see here?—­No!—­I have perpetrated the folly of ordering all these things for which I am now indebted and which must be paid for at once, and now I am about to be sued.  There! you were determined to urge me to confess all that—­Such are my worries and they are not yours, so I ask your pardon, my dear Vaudrey:  so let us talk of something else.  Well! how did the Fraynais interpellation turn out?—­What has taken place in the Chamber?”