Adrienne asked herself whether she was really dreaming now.  Approaching her, she saw, crossing the salon with a queenly step, that lovely, insolent creature, trailing a long black satin skirt, her superb bosom imprisoned in a corsage trimmed with jet, and crossed, as it were, with a blood-red stripe formed by a cordon of roses.  Marianne’s fawn-colored head seemed to imperiously defy from afar the pale woman who stood with her two hands falling at her side as if overwhelmed.

The vision, for vision it was, approached like one of the nightmares that haunt people’s dreams.  Adrienne’s first glance encountered the direct gaze of Marianne’s gray eyes.  Behind Mademoiselle Kayser came De Rosas, his ruddy Castilian face that was ordinarily pensive beamed to-day, but Madame Vaudrey did not perceive him.  She saw only this woman, the woman who was approaching her, in her own house, insolently, impudently, to defy her after having outraged her, to insult her after having deceived her!

Adrienne felt a violent wrath rising within her and suddenly her entire being seemed longing to bound toward Marianne, to drive her out after casting her name in her teeth.

Instinctively she looked around her with the wild glance of a wretched woman who no longer knows what to do, as if seeking for some assistance or advice.

Vaudrey’s wan pallor and Lissac’s supplicating gesture appealed to her and at once restored her to herself.  It was true! she had no right to cause a scandal.  She was within the walls of the ministry, in a common salon into which this girl had almost a right to enter, just like so many others lost in the crowd of guests.  For Adrienne, it was not merely a question of personal vanity or honor that was at stake, but also Vaudrey’s reputation.  She felt herself in view, ah! what a word:—­in view, that it to say, she was like an actress to whom neither a false step nor a false note is permitted; compelled to smile while death was at her heart, to parade while her entrails were torn with grief, forced to feign and to wear a mask in the presence of all who were there, and to lie to all the invited guests, indifferent and inimical, as Ramel said, and who were looking about ready at any moment to sneer and to hiss.

She recovered, by an effort that swelled her heart, strength to show nothing of the feeling of indignant rebellion that was stifling her.

She closed her eyes.

Marianne Kayser passed onward, losing herself with Simon and De Rosas in the human furrow that opened before her and immediately closed upon her, and followed by a murmur of admiration.

Adrienne had not however seen the pale, insolent countenance of the young woman so closely approach her suffering and disconsolate face.  Above all, she had not seen the jealous, rapid glance that flashed unconsciously in Vaudrey’s eyes when he saw Jose de Rosas triumphantly following the imperious Marianne.  Ah! that look of sorrowful anger would have penetrated like a red-hot iron into Adrienne’s soul.  That glance that Guy caught a glimpse of told eloquently of wounded love and bruised vanity on the part of that man who, placed here between these two women, his mistress and the other, suffered less from the sorrow caused to Adrienne than from Marianne’s treason in deserting him for this Spaniard.