“Well?” she asked.

“Well, when my hopes seemed on the point of being realized, it happened that the mystery of your birth was suddenly revealed to you.  You found a noble, powerful, and wealthy family.  You resumed the illustrious name of which you had been robbed; your enemies were crushed; and your rights were restored to you.  It was no longer Van Klopen’s hired carriage that stopped in front of the Hotel des Folies, but a carriage bearing a gorgeous coat of arms.  That carriage was yours; and it came to take you to your own residence in the Faubourg St. Germain, or to your ancestral manor.”

“And yourself?” inquired the girl.

Maxence repressed one of those nervous spasms which frequently break out in tears, and, with a gloomy look,

“I,” he answered, “standing on the edge of the pavement, I waited for a word or a look from you.  You had forgotten my very existence.  Your coachman whipped his horses; they started at a gallop; and soon I lost sight of you.  And then a voice, the inexorable voice of fate, cried to me, ‘Never more shalt thou see her!’”

With a superb gesture Mlle. Lucienne drew herself up.

“It is not with your heart, I trust, that you judge me, M. Maxence Favoral,” she uttered.

He trembled lest he had offended her.

“I beseech you,” he began.

But she went on in a voice vibrating with emotion,

“I am not of those who basely deny their past.  Your dream will never be realized.  Those things are only seen on the stage.  If it did realize itself, however, if the carriage with the coat-of-arms did come to the door, the companion of the evil days, the friend who offered me his month’s salary to pay my debt, would have a seat by my side.”

That was more happiness than Maxence would have dared to hope for.  He tried, in order to express his gratitude, to find some of those words which always seem to be lacking at the most critical moments.  But he was suffocating; and the tears, accumulated by so many successive emotions, were rising to his eyes.

With a passionate impulse, he seized Mlle. Lucienne’s hand, and, taking it to his lips, he covered it with kisses.  Gently but resolutely she withdrew her hand, and, fixing upon him her beautiful clear gaze,

“Friends,” she uttered.

Her accent alone would have been sufficient to dissipate the presumptuous illusions of Maxence, had he had any.  But he had none.

“Friends only,” he replied, “until the day when you shall be my wife.  You cannot forbid me to hope.  You love no one?”

“No one.”

“Well since we are going to tread the path of life, let me think that we may find love at some turn of the road.”

She made no answer.  And thus was sealed between them a treaty of friendship, to which they were to remain so strictly faithful, that the word “love” never once rose to their lips.