Giselle’s sad smile seemed to answer, “No need—­I am aware of it—­I know my husband.”  Encouraged by this, Jacqueline went on with her confession, hiding nothing that was wrong, showing herself just as she had been, a poor, proud child who had set out to battle for herself in a dangerous world.  At every step she had been more and more conscious of her own imprudence, of her own weakness, and of an ever-increasing desire to be done with independence; to submit to law, to be subject to any rules which would deliver her from the necessity of obeying no will but her own.

“Ah!” she cried, “I am so disgusted with independence, with amusement, and amusing people!  Tell me what to do in future—­I am weary of taking charge of myself.  I said so the other day to the Abbe Bardin.  He is the only person I have seen since my return.  It seems to me I am coming back to my old ideas—­you remember how I once wished to end my days in the cell of a Carmelite?  You might love me again then, perhaps, and Fred and poor Madame d’Argy, who must feel so bitterly against me since her son was wounded, might forgive me.  No one feels bitterly against the dead, and it is the same as being dead to be a Carmelite nun.  You would all speak of me sometimes to each other as one who had been very unhappy, who had been guilty of great foolishness, but who had repaired her faults as best she could.”

Poor Jacqueline!  She was no longer a girl of the period; in her grief and humiliation she belonged to the past.  Old-fashioned forms of penitence attracted her.

“And what did the Abbe Bardin tell you?” asked Giselle, with a slight movement of her shoulders.

“He only told me that he could not say at present whether that were my vocation.”

“Nor can I,” said Giselle.

Jacqueline lifted up her face, wet with tears, which she had been leaning on the lap of Giselle.

“I do not see what else I can do, unless you would get me a place as governess somewhere at the ends of the earth,” she said.  “I could teach children their letters.  I should not mind doing anything.  I never should complain.  Ah! if you lived all by yourself, Giselle, how I should implore you to take me to teach little Enguerrand!”

“I think you might do better than that,” said Giselle, wiping her friend’s eyes almost as a mother might have done, “if you would only listen to Fred.”

Jacqueline’s cheeks became crimson.

“Don’t mock me—­it is cruel—­I am too unworthy—­it would pain me to see him.  Shame—­regret—­you understand!  But I can tell you one thing, Giselle—­only you.  You may tell it to him when he is quite old, when he has been long married, and when everything concerning me is a thing of the past.  I never had loved any one with all my heart up to the moment when I read in that paper that he had fought for me, that his blood had flowed for me, that after all that had passed he still thought me worthy of being defended by him.”