“Why don’t you go to see your stepmother?”

“My stepmother?  Oh, no!  She is at the bottom of all that has happened to me.”

“Or Madame d’Argy?  Or Madame de Talbrun?  Madame de Talbrun is the one who would give you good advice.”

Jacqueline shook her head with a sad smile.

“Let me stay here.  Don’t you remember—­years ago—­but it seems like yesterday—­all the rest is like a nightmare—­how I used to hide myself under your petticoats, and you would say, going on with your knitting:  ‘You see she is not here; I can’t think where she can be.’  Hide me now just like that, dear old Modeste.  Only hide me.”

And Modeste, full of heartfelt pity, promised to hide her “dear child” from every one, which promise, however, did not prevent her, for she was very self-willed, from going, without Jacqueline’s knowledge, to see Madame de Talbrun and tell her all that had taken place.  She was hurt and amazed at her reception by Giselle, and at her saying, without any offer of help or words of sympathy, “She has only reaped what she has sown.”  Giselle would have been more than woman had not Fred, and a remembrance of the wrongs that he had suffered through Jacqueline, now stood between them.  For months he had been the prime object in her life; her mission of comforter had brought her the greatest happiness she had ever known.  She tried to make him turn his attention to some serious work in life; she wanted to keep him at home, for his mother’s sake, she thought; she fancied she had inspired him with a taste for home life.  If she had examined herself she might have discovered that the task she had undertaken of doing good to this young man was not wholly for his sake but partly for her own.  She wanted to see him nearly every day and to occupy a place in his life ever larger and larger.  But for some time past the conscientious Giselle had neglected the duty of strict self-examination.  She was thankful to be happy—­and though Fred was a man little given to self-flattery in his relations with women, he could not but be pleased at the change produced in her by her intercourse with him.

But while Fred and Giselle considered themselves as two friends trying to console each other, people had begun to talk about them.  Even Madame d’Argy asked herself whether her son might not have escaped from the cruel claws of a young coquette of the new school to fall into a worse scrape with a married woman.  She imagined what might happen if the jealousy of “that wild boar of an Oscar de Talbrun” were aroused; the dangers, far more terrible than the perils of the sea, that might in such a case await her only son, the child for whose safety her mother-love caused her to suffer perpetual torments.  “O mothers! mothers!” she often said to herself, “how much they are to be pitied.  And they are very blind.  If Fred must get into danger and difficulty for any woman, it should not have been for Giselle de Talbrun.”