“But perhaps you have never answered it.”

“That is true.”

“I knew very well that you were false, like other women.”

Madame Jules continued to smile.

“Listen, monsieur,” she said; “if I told you the real reason, you would think it ridiculous.  I do not think it false to abstain from telling things that the world would laugh at.”

“All secrets demand, in order to be told, a friendship of which I am no doubt unworthy, madame.  But you cannot have any but noble secrets; do you think me capable of jesting on noble things?”

“Yes,” she said, “you, like all the rest, laugh at our purest sentiments; you calumniate them.  Besides, I have no secrets.  I have the right to love my husband in the face of all the world, and I say so,—­I am proud of it; and if you laugh at me when I tell you that I dance only with him, I shall have a bad opinion of your heart.”

“Have you never danced since your marriage with any one but your husband?”

“Never.  His arm is the only one on which I have leaned; I have never felt the touch of another man.”

“Has your physician never felt your pulse?”

“Now you are laughing at me.”

“No, madame, I admire you, because I comprehend you.  But you let a man hear your voice, you let yourself be seen, you—­in short, you permit our eyes to admire you—­”

“Ah!” she said, interrupting him, “that is one of my griefs.  Yes, I wish it were possible for a married woman to live secluded with her husband, as a mistress lives with her lover, for then—­”

“Then why were you, two hours ago, on foot, disguised, in the rue Soly?”

“The rue Soly, where is that?”

And her pure voice gave no sign of any emotion; no feature of her face quivered; she did not blush; she remained calm.

“What! you did not go up to the second floor of a house in the rue des Vieux-Augustins at the corner of the rue Soly?  You did not have a hackney-coach waiting near by?  You did not return in it to the flower-shop in the rue Richelieu, where you bought the feathers that are now in your hair?”

“I did not leave my house this evening.”

As she uttered that lie she was smiling and imperturbable; she played with her fan; but if any one had passed a hand down her back they would, perhaps, have found it moist.  At that instant Auguste remembered the instructions of the vidame.

“Then it was some one who strangely resembled you,” he said, with a credulous air.

“Monsieur,” she replied, “if you are capable of following a woman and detecting her secrets, you will allow me to say that it is a wrong, a very wrong thing, and I do you the honor to say that I disbelieve you.”