“So do I,” said Marianne.  “We have only chatted together five minutes, but I have found that time enough to discover that you and I have many tastes in common.  I am greatly flattered thereby.”

“And I am very happy,” replied Vaudrey, who was disturbed by her direct glances that pierced him like a blade.

She had resumed her place on the divan, but Vaudrey had already forgiven her tete-a-tete with Rosas—­and in truth, what had he to forgive?—­This burning glance had effaced everything.  He bore it away like a bright ray and still shuddered at the sensation he experienced.

He was in a hurry to leave.  He now felt a sudden attack of nervousness.  He was at the same moment charmed and bored.  Again he resumed—­amid the throng that made way for him, humbly performing its duty as a crowd—­his role of minister, raising his head, and greeting with his official smile, but, at the bottom of his heart, really consumed by an entirely different thought.  His brain was full of blue, of floating clouds, and he still heard Marianne’s voice ringing in his ears with an insinuating tone, whispering:  “We have many tastes in common,” together with all kinds of mutual understandings which, as it were, burned like a fire in his heart.

He saw Adrienne still seated in the same place and smiling sweetly at him,—­a smile of ardent devotion, but which seemed to him to be lukewarm.  He leaned toward her, reached his hands out and said to De Lissac, hurriedly, as he grasped his hand:  “We meet later, do we not, Guy?” Then he disappeared in the antechamber, while the servants hurried toward Madame Vaudrey, bearing her cloak, and as Vaudrey put on his overcoat, a voice called out: 

“His Excellency’s carriage.”

“I am exhausted,” said Adrienne, when she had taken her place in the carriage.  “What about yourself?”

“I? not at all!  I am not at all tired.  It was very entertaining!  One must show one’s self now—­”

“I know that very well,” the young wife replied.

Like a child who is anxious to go to sleep, she gently rested her hood-covered head on Sulpice’s shoulder.  Her tiny hands sought her husband’s hand, to press it beneath her cloak, as warm as a nest; and after she had closed her eyes, overcome as she was by weariness, her breathing seemed to become gradually almost as regular as in slumber, and Sulpice Vaudrey recalled once more, beneath the light of the chandeliers, that pretty blonde, with her half-bare arms and shoulders, and strange eyes, who moistened her dry lips and smiled as she swallowed her sherbet.

VI

In the pretty little Japanese salon, with its panels of sky-blue satin, framed with gilded bamboo, Marianne was seated on the divan, half-facing the duke as if to penetrate his inward thoughts, and she seemed to the Castilian as she did to Vaudrey, to be a most charming creature amid all those surroundings that might have been made expressly to match her fair beauty.  Moreover, with Rosas, her freedom of manner was entirely different from that which she manifested to Sulpice, and she embraced the young man with a passionate, fervent glance.