“Counts for nothing!  A fellow to be pitied!” cried Fred, “a man who has just been elected to the Institute—­you are hard to satisfy!”

Jacqueline sat looking at him like a young sorceress engaged in sticking pins into the heart of a waxen figure of her enemy.  She never missed an opportunity of showing her implacable dislike of him.

She turned to Fred:  “What I was telling you,” she said, “I am quite willing to repeat in his presence.  The thing has lost its importance now that he has become more indifferent to me than any other man in the world.”

She stopped, hoping that Marien had understood what she was saying and that he resented the humiliating avowal from her own lips that her childish love was now only a memory.

“If that is the only confession you have to make to me,” said Fred, who had almost recovered his composure, “I can put up with my former rival, and I pass a sponge over all that has happened in your long past of seventeen years and a half, Jacqueline.  Tell me only that at present you like no one better than me.”

She smiled a half-smile, but he did not see it.  She made no answer.

“Is he here, too—­like the other!” he asked, sternly.

And she saw his restless eyes turn for an instant to the conservatory, where Madame de Villegry, leaning back in her armchair, and Gerard de Cymier, on a low seat almost at her feet, were carrying on their platonic flirtation.

“Oh! you must not think of quarrelling with him,” cried Jacqueline, frightened at the look Fred fastened on De Cymier.

“No, it would be of no use.  I shall go out to Tonquin, that’s all.”

“Fred!  You are not serious.”

“You will see whether I am not serious.  At this very moment I know a man who will be glad to exchange with me.”

“What! go and get yourself killed at Tonquin for a foolish little girl like me, who is very, very fond of you, but hardly knows her own mind.  It would be absurd!”

“People are not always killed at Tonquin, but I must have new interests, something to divert my mind from—­”

“Fred! my dear Fred”—­Jacqueline had suddenly become almost tender, almost suppliant.  “Your mother!  Think of your mother!  What would she say?  Oh, my God!”

“My mother must be allowed to think that I love my profession better than all else.  But, Jacqueline,” continued the poor fellow, clinging in despair to the very smallest hope, as a drowning man catches at a straw, “if you do not, as you said, know exactly your own mind—­if you would like to question your own heart—­I would wait—­”

Jacqueline was biting the end of her fan—­a conflict was taking place within her breast.  But to certain temperaments there is pleasure in breaking a chain or in leaping a barrier; she said: 

“Fred, I am too much your friend to deceive you.”

At that moment M. de Cymier came toward them with his air of assurance:  “Mademoiselle, you forget that you promised me this waltz,” he said.