“It is quite simple, and I am going to enlighten you in two words.  It has got into my head that after being not very amiable to me, you are now almost too much so.  I am sincerely touched and charmed at it; but I really fear, sometimes, to turn too much to my own profit attentions to which I am far from having the sole right.  You know how fond I am of your husband.  There can be no question of jealousy in this case, of course; but a man’s love is proud and prompt to take umbrage.  Without stooping to low and otherwise impossible sentiments, Pierre, seeing himself somewhat neglected, might feel offended and afflicted, at which we would both be greatly grieved, would we not?”

“I do not know how to do anything half-way,” she said with a gesture of impatience.  “How can I change my nature?  It is with my own heart, and not with that of another, that I love and that I hate; and then, why should it not enter into my plans to excite Pierre’s jealousy?  My old traditional hatred for you has perhaps made this deep calculation; he would kill either you or me, and that would be as good a denouement as any other.”

“You must allow me to prefer another,” said Lucan, still trying, but without much success, to give a cheerful turn to this wildly passionate conversation.

“However,” she went on, “you may rest easy, my dear sir.  Pierre is not jealous.  He suspects nothing, as they say in plays!”

She laughed one of her wicked laughs, and added at once in a graver tone: 

“And what could he suspect?  In being amiable toward you, I am merely acting under order, and no one can tell how much of it is genuine and how much put on.”

“I feel quite certain that you don’t know yourself,” he said, laughingly.  “You are a person of naturally restless disposition; you require agitation, and when there is none you try to imitate it as best as you can.  Whether you like, or whether you don’t like your step-father, is not a very dramatic affair.  There is no room here for any but very simple and very ordinary sentiments.  It is well enough to complicate them a little—­is it not, my dear?”

“Yes, my dear!” she said, emphasizing ironically the last word.

Whereupon she started her horse at a gallop.

They were then just reaching the edge of the woods.  He soon saw her leave the direct road that led across them, and take a path over the heath as if intending to dash through the thickest of the timber.  At the same instant Clotilde ran up to him, and touching his shoulder with the tip of her whip: 

“Where in the world is Julia going?” she said.

Lucan replied with a vague gesture and a smile.

“I am sure,” rejoined Clotilde, “that she is going to drink at that fountain, yonder.  She was complaining a little while since of being thirsty.  Do follow her, dear, will you, and prevent her doing so.  She is so warm!  It might be fatal to her.  Run, I beg of you.”