“No!  I tell you, mamma,” she said to Madame Chebe one day, “I never will consent to make a friend like her unhappy.  I should suffer too much from remorse,—­poor Desiree!  Haven’t you noticed how badly she looks since I came home; what a beseeching way she has of looking at me?  No, I won’t cause her that sorrow; I won’t take away her Frantz.”

Even while she admired her daughter’s generous spirit, Madame Chebe looked upon that as a rather exaggerated sacrifice, and remonstrated with her.

“Take care, my child; we aren’t rich.  A husband like Frantz doesn’t turn up every day.”

“Very well! then I won’t marry at all,” declared Sidonie flatly, and, deeming her pretext an excellent one, she clung persistently to it.  Nothing could shake her determination, neither the tears shed by Frantz, who was exasperated by her refusal to fulfil her promise, enveloped as it was in vague reasons which she would not even explain to him, nor the entreaties of Risler, in whose ear Madame Chebe had mysteriously mumbled her daughter’s reasons, and who in spite of everything could not but admire such a sacrifice.

“Don’t revile her, I tell you!  She’s an angel!” he said to his brother, striving to soothe him.

“Ah! yes, she is an angel,” assented Madame Chebe with a sigh, so that the poor betrayed lover had not even the right to complain.  Driven to despair, he determined to leave Paris, and as Grand Combe seemed too near in his frenzied longing for flight, he asked and obtained an appointment as overseer on the Suez Canal at Ismailia.  He went away without knowing, or caring to know aught of, Desiree’s love; and yet, when he went to bid her farewell, the dear little cripple looked up into his face with her shy, pretty eyes, in which were plainly written the words: 

“I love you, if she does not.”

But Frantz Risler did not know how to read what was written in those eyes.

Fortunately, hearts that are accustomed to suffer have an infinite store of patience.  When her friend had gone, the lame girl, with her charming morsel of illusion, inherited from her father and refined by her feminine nature, returned bravely to her work, saying to herself: 

“I will wait for him.”

And thereafter she spread the wings of her birds to their fullest extent, as if they were all going, one after another, to Ismailia in Egypt.  And that was a long distance!

Before sailing from Marseilles, young Risler wrote Sidonie a farewell letter, at once laughable and touching, wherein, mingling the most technical details with the most heartrending adieux, the unhappy engineer declared that he was about to set sail, with a broken heart, on the transport Sahib, “a sailing-ship and steamship combined, with engines of fifteen-hundred-horse power,” as if he hoped that so considerable a capacity would make an impression on his ungrateful betrothed, and cause her ceaseless remorse.  But Sidonie had very different matters on her mind.