Mademoiselle Schult, getting impatient, began to roll up yards and yards of crochet, and coughed, by way of a signal, but remembering how disagreeable it would have been to herself to be interrupted in a tete-a-tete with her apothecary, she thought it not worth while to disturb them in these last moments.  M. de Nailles’s orders had been that she was to sit in the atelier.  So she continued to sit there, doing what she had been told to do without any qualms of conscience.

When Marien had shown Jacqueline all his drawings he asked her:  “Are you satisfied?”

But Jacqueline’s hand was already on the portiere which separated the little room from Marien’s bedchamber.

“Oh!  I beg pardon,” she exclaimed, pausing on the threshold.

“One would think you would like to see me asleep,” said Marien with some little embarrassment.

“I never should have thought your bedroom would have been so pretty.  Why, it is as elegant as a lady’s chamber,” said Jacqueline, slipping into it as she spoke, with an exciting consciousness of doing something she ought not to do.

“What an insult, when I thought all my tastes were simple and severe,” he replied; but he had not followed her into the chamber, withheld by an impulse of modesty men sometimes feel, when innocence is led into audacity through ignorance.

“What lovely flowers you have!” said Jacqueline, from within.  “Don’t they make your head ache?”

“I take them out at night.”

“I did not know that men liked, as we do, to be surrounded by flowers.  Won’t you give me one?”

“All, if you like.”

“Oh! one pink will be enough for me.”

“Then take it,” said Marien; her curiosity alarmed him, and he was anxious to get her away.

“Would it not be nicer if you gave it me yourself?” she replied, with reproach in her tones.

“Here is one, Mademoiselle.  And now I must tell you that I want to dress.  I have to go out immediately.”

She pinned the pink into her bodice so high that she could inhale its perfume.

“I beg your pardon.  Thank you, and good-by,” she said, extending her hand to him with a sigh.

“Au revoir.”

“Yes—­’au revoir’ at home—­but that will not be like here.”

As she stood there before him there came into her eyes a strange expression, to which, without exactly knowing why, he replied by pressing his lips fervently on the little hand he was still holding in his own.

Very often since her infancy he had kissed her before witnesses, but this time she gave a little cry, and turned as white as the flower whose petals were touching her cheek.

Marien started back alarmed.

“Good-by,” he said in a tone that he endeavored to make careless—­but in vain.

Though she was much agitated herself she failed not to remark his emotion, and on the threshold of the atelier, she blew a kiss back to him from the tips of her gloved fingers, without speaking or smiling.  Then she went back to Fraulein Schult, who was still sitting in the place where she had left her, and said:  “Let us go.”