“Why?—­Because it was I who formerly hummed it?”

“Yes,” said Rosas in a lowered tone.  “Well! yes, just for that reason!—­”

He drew closer to her on the divan, and she said to him, laughingly: 

“How fortunate it is that Faure is singing yonder!  He attracts everybody and so leaves us quite alone in this salon.  It is very pleasant.  Would you like to go and applaud Faure?  It is some years since I heard him.”

“You are very malicious, Marianne,” said the duke.  “Let me steal this happy, fleeting hour.  I am very happy.”

“You are happy?”

“Profoundly happy, and simply because I am near you, listening to you and looking at you—­”

“My poor Job,” she said, still laughing, “would you like me to sing you the refrain that we heard at the Varietes?”

De Rosas did not reply, but simply looked at her.

He felt as if he were surrounded with all the perfume of youth.  On a console beside Marianne, stood a vase of inlaid enamel containing sprigs of white lilacs which as she leaned forward, surrounded her fair head as with an aureole of spring.  Her locks were encircled with milk-white flowers and bright green leaves, transparent and clear, like the limpid green of water; and at times these sprigs were gently shaken, dropping a white bud on Marianne’s hair, that looked like a drop of milk amid a heap of ruddy gold.

Ah! how at this moment, all the poetry, all the past with its unacknowledged love swelled Rosas’s heart and rushed to his lips.  In this brilliantly-lighted salon, under the blaze of the lights, amid the shimmering reflections of the satin draperies, he forgot everything in his rapture at the presence of this woman, lovely to adoration, whose glance penetrated his very veins and filled him with restless thoughts.

The distant music, gentle, penetrating and languishing, some soothing air from Gounod, reached them like a gentle breeze wafted into the room.

Jose believed himself to be in a dream.

“Ah! if you only knew, madame,” he said, becoming more passionate with each word that he spoke, as if he had been gulping down some liqueur, “if you only knew how you have travelled with me everywhere, in thought, there, carried with me like a scapular—­”

“My portrait?” said Marianne.  “I remember it.  I was very slender then, prettier, a young girl, in fact.”

“No! no! not your portrait.  I tore that up in a fit of frenzy.”

“Tore it up?”

“Yes, as I thought that those eyes, those lips and that brow belonged to another.”

Marianne’s cheeks became pallid.

“But I have taken with me something better than that portrait:  I preserved you, you were always present, and pretty, so pretty—­as you are now, Marianne—­Look at yourself!  No one could be lovelier!”

“And why,” she said slowly, speaking in a deep, endearing tone, “why did you not speak to me thus, of old?”