“You want to remind me again, then, that I am married?  A moment ago, you stabbed me by pin-thrusts.”

“In speaking of your household?  Say then with knife-thrusts.”

“Why did you mention my wife before Monsieur de Rosas?”

“Why,” said Marianne, “you do not understand anything.  It was for your sake, for you alone, in order to explain the presence in Marianne’s house, of a minister who is considered to lead a puritan life.  Nothing could be more simple!—­Would you have me tell him that you neglect your wife and that you are my lover?  Perhaps you would have liked that better!”

“Yes, perhaps,” said Vaudrey passionately.

“Vain fellow!” the pretty girl said as she placed upon his mouth her little hand which he kept upon his lips.  “Then you would like me to parade our secrets everywhere and to publicly announce our happiness?”

“I should like,” he said, as he removed his lips from the soft palm of her hand, “that all the world should know that you are mine, mine only—­only mine, are you not?—­That man?”

His eyes entreated her and lost their fire.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

“Let Monsieur de Rosas alone in tranquillity and let us return to my house, our house,” she said, with a tender expression in her eyes.

“You do not love him?”

“No.”

“And you love me?”

“I have told you so.”

“You love me?  You love me?”

“I love you!—­Ah!” she said, “how unhappy you would be, nevertheless, if I told you aloud some day in one of the lobbies of the Assembly what you ask me to repeat here in a whisper.”

“I should prefer that to losing you and to knowing that you did not love me.”

“He is telling the truth, however, the great fool!” cried Marianne, laughing.

“The real, sincere, profound truth!”

He drew her to him, seated on the vulgar divan where Simon Kayser was wont to display his paradoxes, and encircling her waist with both arms he felt her yielding form beneath her satin gown, and wished her to bend her fair face to his lips that were craving a kiss.

Marianne took his face between her soft hands, and looking at him with an odd smile, tender and ironical at once, at this big simpleton who was completely dominated by her mocking tenderness, she said: 

“You are just the same Sulpice!”—­as she spoke, she bent over him engagingly, and laughed merrily while he kissed her.

IV

Jose de Rosas thought himself much more the master of himself than he actually was.

This energetic man, firm as a very fine steel blade, had hoped to find that in living at a distance from Marianne, he might forget her or at least strengthen himself against her influence.  He found on his return that he was, however, more seduced by her than before, his heart was wholly filled and gnawed by the distracting image of the pretty girl.  He had borne away with him to London, as everywhere in fact, the puzzling smile, the sparkling glance of this woman’s gray eyes that ceaselessly appeared to him at his bedside, and beside him, like some phantom.