Sulpice ran lightly up the great marble staircase leading to his private apartments.  Handing his hat and coat to a servant in the antechamber, he gayly entered the little salon, where he found his wife sitting by a table reading La Revue by the light of a shaded lamp.  At the sight of her pretty, fresh young face extended to greet him, with her blue eyes and smiling air, at the sound of her clear, sweet, but rather timid voice asking a little anxiously:  “Well?” Sulpice took the fair face in both his hands and his burning lips imprinted a long kiss on the white forehead, over which a few curls of golden hair strayed.

“Well, my dear Adrienne, I have been greatly interested.  All the kindness with which I was received, the evident delight with which the new cabinet has been welcomed by the people, even the grimaces of Pichereau whom I met,—­if you only knew where—­all gave me pleasure, delighted me, and yet made me fear.  Minister!  Do you know what I have been thinking of since I was made a minister?”

“Of what have you been thinking?” asked the young wife, who, with her hands folded, gazed trustingly and sweetly into Sulpice’s feverish eyes.

“I?—­I have been telling myself that it is not enough to be a minister.  One must be a great minister!  You understand, Adrienne, a great minister!”

As he spoke he took Adrienne’s hands in his, and the young wife glanced up admiringly at this young man burning with hope, who stood there before her, declaring:  “I will be great!”

She had never dreamed of his reaching such heights as these on that day when she felt the fingers of her fiance trembling in her hand, the day that Sulpice had whispered the words in her ear which made her heart leap with joy:  “I love you, Adrienne, I shall always love you—­Always!”

III

Sulpice Vaudrey had married Adrienne for love.  She brought to him from the convent at Grenoble where she had been educated, the charming innocence of a young girl and the innate devotion of a woman.  She was an orphan with a considerable fortune, but although Sulpice had only moderate resources, he had scarcely thought of her wealth, not even inquiring of her guardian, Doctor Reboux, on the occasion of his formal demand for her hand, about the dowry of Mademoiselle Gerard.

He had met her at more than one soiree at Grenoble, where she appeared timid, dazzled and retiring, and quietly interrogating everything by her sweet glance.  Some few words exchanged carelessly, music which they had listened to side by side, the ordinary everyday intercourse in society, had made Sulpice acquainted with his wife; but the sight of the pretty blonde—­so sweet and gentle—­the childlike timidity of this young girl, something rather pensive in the confiding smile of this blooming creature of eighteen summers, had won him completely.  He was free, and alone, for he had lost, but a short time before, the only creature he loved in the world, his mother, of whom he was the son in the double sense of flesh and spirit, by the nourishment of her breast and by the patient teaching that she had implanted in his mind.