If he did have enough perspicacity to guess what had just taken place, he did not in any way show it.  He sat down; and it was only after conversing for a few moments upon indifferent subjects, that he asked how Mlle. Gilberte was.

“She is somewhat—­unwell,” stammered Mme. Favoral.

He did not appear surprised; only,

“Our dear Favoral,” he said, “will be still more pained than I am when he hears of this mishap.”

Better than any other mother, Mme. Favoral must have understood and approved Mlle. Gilberte’s invincible repugnance.  To her also, when she was young, her father had come one day, and said, “I have discovered a husband for you.”  She had accepted him blindly.  Bruised and wounded by daily outrages, she had sought refuge in marriage as in a haven of safety.

And since, hardly a day had elapsed that she had not thought it would have been better for her to have died rather then to have riveted to her neck those fetters that death alone can remove.  She thought, therefore, that her daughter was perfectly right.  And yet twenty years of slavery had so weakened the springs of her energy, that under the glance of Costeclar, threatening her with her husband’s name, she felt embarrassed, and could scarcely stammer some timid excuses.  And she allowed him to prolong his visit, and consequently her torment, for over an half an hour; then, when he had gone,

“He and your father understand each other,” said she to her daughter, “that is but too evident.  What is the use of struggling?”

A fugitive blush colored the pale cheeks of Mlle. Gilberte.  For the past forty-eight hours she had been exhausting herself, seeking an issue to an impossible situation; and she had accustomed her mind to the worst eventualities.

“Do you wish me, then, to desert the paternal roof?” she exclaimed.

Mme. Favoral almost dropped on the floor.

“You would run away,” she stammered, “you!”

“Rather than become that man’s wife, yes!”

“And where would you go, unfortunate child? what would you do?”

“I can earn my living.”

Mme. Favoral shook her head sadly.  The same suspicions were reviving within her that she had felt once before.

“Gilberte,” she said in a beseeching tone, “am I, then, no longer your best friend? and will you not tell me from what sources you draw your courage and your resolution?”

And, as her daughter said nothing: 

“God alone knows what may happen!” sighed the poor woman.

Nothing happened, but what could have been easily foreseen.  When M. Favoral came home to dinner, he was whistling a perfect storm on the stairs.  He abstained at first from all recrimination; but towards the end of the meal, with the most sarcastic look he could assume: 

“It seems,” he said to his daughter, “that you were unwell this afternoon?”