“Oh! how I love you!” he said, distractedly, all his passion shattering his coldness of manner, as the sun melts the snow.  “If you but knew how jealous and crazed I am about you!—­I desire you, I adore you, and I condemn myself to remain glacial before you, beneath your glance that fires my blood—­I love you, and the recollection of Guy hindered me from telling you that all that is mine belongs to you—­I am a ferocious creature, you know, capable of mad outbursts, senseless anger, and unreasoning flight—­Yes, I have wished to escape from you again.  Well! no, I remain with you; I love you, I love you!—­You shall be my wife, do you hear?  My wife!—­Ah! what a moment of bliss!  I have loved you for years!  Have you not seen it, Marianne?”

“I have seen it and I loved you!  I also have kept silence!  I saw plainly that you believed that I had given myself to another—­No, no, I am yours, nothing but yours!  All my love, all myself, take it; I have kept it for you; for I hate the past, more than that, I do not know that it exists—­It is despised, obliterated, it is nothing!  But you, ah! you, you are my life!”

She left Jose’s, her youth renewed, haughty, intoxicated with delight.  She walked along alone, in the paths of the Champs-Elysees, the rusty leaves falling in showers at the breath of the already cold wind, her heels ringing on the damp asphalt.  She marched straight ahead, her thoughts afire from her intoxicating emotions.  It seemed that Paris belonged to her.

That evening, she was to go to the theatre.  It was arranged that Vaudrey should wait for her at the entrance with a hired carriage and take her to Rue Prony.  She wrote to him that she could not leave the house.  A slight headache.  Uncle Kayser undertook to have the letter taken by a commissionaire.

“Unless you would rather have me go to the ministry!”

“Are you mad?” Marianne said.

“That is true, it would be immoral.”

She wished to have the evening to herself, quite alone, so that she could let her dreams take flight.

Dreams?  Nonsense!  On the contrary, it was a dazzling reality:  a fortune, a title, a positive escape from want and the mire.  What a revenge!

“It is enough to drive one mad!”

Sudden fears seized her; the terror of the too successful gambler.  What if everything crumbled like a house of cards!  She wished that she were several weeks older.

“Time passes so quickly, and yet one has a desire to spur it on.”

Now in the solitude of her house she felt weary.  She could neither read nor think, and became feverish.  She regretted that she had written to Vaudrey.  She wished to go to the theatre.  A new operetta would be a diversion, and why should she not go?  She had the ticket for her box.  She could at once inform Vaudrey that her headache had vanished.

“And then he bores me!—­Especially now.”

Matters, however, must not be abruptly changed.  Suppose Rosas should take a sudden fancy to fly off again!  Besides, she had mutual interests with the minister, there was an account to be settled.