But where was the duke now?  Among the Kabyles or the Mormons?  At Tahiti, Greenland, or gone to the devil?  The papers had once announced that he was organizing an expedition to the North Pole.  Perhaps he was lost among the icebergs in the Arctic Seas!  She smiled at that, sighing involuntarily with sincere emotion, but prompted by selfish regret.

It had seemed to her that Jose had more than once permitted himself to express his affection for her.  Politely, correctly, of course, as a gallant man addresses a friend’s mistress, but manifesting in his reserve a host of understood sentiments and tender restraint that suggested hidden or implied declarations.  Marianne had pretended not to understand him.  At that time, she loved Guy or thought that she loved him, which amounts to the same thing.  She contented herself with smiling at the flirtation of Monsieur de Rosas.

“I have perhaps been very stupid,” she said to herself.  “Pshaw! he might have been as silly as I, if occasion demanded.  The obligations of friendship!  The phantom of Guy!”

She suddenly stopped and this name escaped her lips:  Jose—­Joseph!

Nevertheless, this was one of the vexations of this girl:  she was angry because she had acted rightly.  Others suffer remorse for their ill deeds, but she suffered for her virtue.  She often thought of the Duc de Rosas, as her mother Eve must have thought of Paradise lost.  She would have stirred, astonished, conquered, crushed Paris, if she had been the mistress of Rosas.

“What then!  Whose fault was it?  How foolish of one not to dare everything!”

Now see how suddenly and unexpectedly, just as an adversary might offer an opportunity for revenge, chance, at the turning-point of her life, had brought back to Paris this Jose whom she had never forgotten, and who perhaps remembered her, and by whom she would be recognized most assuredly, in any case.  It was an unhoped, unlooked-for opportunity that restored Marianne’s faith in herself, superstitious as she was, like all successful gamblers.

She had fallen, but how she could raise herself by the arms of the duke!  One must be determined.

Guy and Sabine were met on the way, like two helpers.  She profited by this circumstance, using the one to reach the other and to gain Rosas from the latter.  She bore a grudge, nevertheless, against Guy de Lissac, the insolent and silly fellow who had formerly left her.  Bah! before taking vengeance on him, it was most important to make use of him, and, after all, revenge is so wearisome and useless.

Now Kayser’s niece, Guy’s mistress, a woman who had given herself or who had been taken, who had sold herself or who had been purchased, a young girl who remained so in features, gracefulness and the virgin charms that clothed her courtesan’s body—­her smile a virgin’s, her glance full of frolic—­Marianne was now within a few feet of him whom she expected, wishing for him as a seducer desires a woman.