“Je ne veux me souvenir.... me souvenir de rien!”

“If I remember, I shall be more unhappy.  All has been a dream.  His look was a dream, his pressure of my hand, his kiss on the last day, all—­all—­were dreams.  He was making a fool of me when he gave me that pink which is now in this pile of ashes.  He was laughing when he told me I was more beautiful than was natural.  Never have I been—­never shall I be in his eyes—­more than the baby he remembers playing with her doll.”

And unconsciously, as Jacqueline said these words, she imitated the careless accent with which she had heard them fall from the lips of the artist.  And she would have again to meet him!  If she had had thunder and lightning at her command, as she had had the match with which she had set fire to the memorials of her juvenile folly, Marien would have been annihilated on the spot.  She was at that moment a murderess at heart.  But the dinner-bell rang.  The young fury gave a last glance at the adornments of her pretty bedchamber, so elegant, so original—­all blue and pink, with a couch covered with silk embroidered with flowers.  She seemed to say to them all:  “Keep my secret.  It is a sad one.  Be careful:  keep it safely.”  The cupids on the clock, the little book-rest on a velvet stand, the picture of the Virgin that hung over her bed, with rosaries and palms entwined about it, the photographs of her girl-friends standing on her writing table in pretty frames of old-fashioned silk-all seemed to see her depart with a look of sympathy.

She went down to the dining-room, resolved to prove that she would not submit to punishment.  The best way to brave Madame de Nailles was, she thought, to affect great calmness and indifference, aye, even, if she could, some gayety.  But the task before her was more difficult than she had expected.  Apparently, as a proof of reconciliation, Marien had been kept to dinner.  To see him so soon again after his words of outrage was more than she could bear.  For one moment the earth seemed to sink under her feet; she roused her pride by an heroic effort, and that sustained her.  She exchanged with the artist, as she always did, a friendly “Good-evening!” and ate her dinner, though it nearly choked her.

Madame de Nailles had red eyes; and Jacqueline made the reflection that women who are thirty-five should never weep.  She knew that her face had not been made ugly by her tears, and this gave her a perverse satisfaction in the midst of her misery.  Of Marien she thought:  “He sits there as if he had been put ’en penitence’.”  No doubt he could not endure scenes, and the one he had just passed through must have given him the downcast look which Jacqueline noticed with contempt.