“She is getting to be quite pretty, that little thing,” he said with an easy air.

“She will be pretty,” replied Mademoiselle Rogron.

“You ought to send her to Paris and put her in a shop,” continued the colonel.  “She would make her fortune.  The milliners all want pretty girls.”

“Is that really your advice?” asked Sylvie, in a troubled voice.

“Good!” thought the colonel, “I was right.  Vinet advised me to marry Pierrette just to spoil my chance with the old harridan.  But,” he said aloud, “what else can you do with her?  There’s that beautiful girl Bathilde de Chargeboeuf, noble and well-connected, reduced to single-blessedness,—­nobody will have her.  Pierrette has nothing, and she’ll never marry.  As for beauty, what is it?  To me, for example, youth and beauty are nothing; for haven’t I been a captain of cavalry in the imperial guard, and carried my spurs into all the capitals of Europe, and known all the handsomest women of these capitals?  Don’t talk to me; I tell you youth and beauty are devilishly common and silly.  At forty-eight,” he went on, adding a few years to his age, to match Sylvie’s, “after surviving the retreat from Moscow and going through that terrible campaign of France, a man is broken down; I’m nothing but an old fellow now.  A woman like you would pet me and care for me, and her money, joined to my poor pension, would give me ease in my old days; of course I should prefer such a woman to a little minx who would worry the life out of me, and be thirty years old, with passions, when I should be sixty, with rheumatism.  At my age, a man considers and calculates.  To tell you the truth between ourselves, I should not wish to have children.”

Sylvie’s face was an open book to the colonel during this tirade, and her next question proved to him Vinet’s perfidy.

“Then you don’t love Pierrette?” she said.

“Heavens! are you out of your mind, my dear Sylvie?” he cried.  “Can those who have no teeth crack nuts?  Thank God I’ve got some common-sense and know what I’m about.”

Sylvie thus reassured resolved not to show her own hand, and thought herself very shrewd in putting her own ideas into her brother’s mouth.

“Jerome,” she said, “thought of the match.”

“How could your brother take up such an incongruous idea?  Why, it is only a few days ago that, in order to find out his secrets, I told him I loved Bathilde.  He turned as white as your collar.”

“My brother! does he love Bathilde?” asked Sylvie.

“Madly,—­and yet Bathilde is only after his money.” ("One for you, Vinet!” thought the colonel.) “I can’t understand why he should have told you that about Pierrette.  No, Sylvie,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it in a certain way, “since you have opened this matter” (he drew nearer to her), “well” (he kissed her hand; as a cavalry captain he had already proved his courage), “let me tell you that I desire no wife but you.  Though such a marriage may look like one of convenience, I feel, on my side, a sincere affection for you.”