In the midst of this chatter, which was beginning to attract the notice of the nun, they broke off with a laugh, but it was only one of those laughs ‘au bout des levres’, uttered by persons who have made up their minds to be unhappy.  Then Giselle went on: 

“I know nothing about him, you understand—­but he frightens me.  I tremble to think of taking his arm, of talking to him, of being his wife.  Just think even of saying thou to him!”

“But married people don’t say thou to each other nowadays,” said Jacqueline, “it is considered vulgar.”

“But I shall have to call him by his Christian name!”

“What is Monsieur de Talbrun’s Christian name?”

“Oscar.”

“Humph!  That is not a very pretty name, but you could get over the difficulty—­you could say ‘mon ami’.  After all, your sorrows are less than mine.”

“Poor Jacqueline!” said Giselle, her soft hazel eyes moist with sympathy.

“I have lost at one blow all my illusions, and I have made a horrible discovery, that it would be wicked to tell to any one—­you understand—­not even to my confessor.”

“Heavens! but you could tell your mother!”

“You forget, I have no mother,” replied Jacqueline in a tone which frightened her friend:  “I had a dear mamma once, but she would enter less than any one into my sorrows; and as to my father—­it would make things worse to speak to him,” she added, clasping her hands.  “Have you ever read any novels, Giselle?”

“Hem!” said the discreet voice of the nun, by way of warning.

“Two or three by Walter Scott.”

“Oh! then you can imagine nothing like what I could tell you.  How horrid that nun is, she stops always as she comes near us!  Why can’t she do as Modeste does, and leave us to talk by ourselves?”

It seemed indeed as if the Argus in a black veil had overheard part of this conversation, not perhaps the griefs of Jacqueline, which were not very intelligible, but some of the words spoken by Giselle, for, drawing near her, she said, gently:  “We, too, shall all grieve to lose you, my dearest child; but remember one can serve God anywhere, and save one’s soul—­in the world as well as in a convent.”  And she passed on, giving a kind smile to Jacqueline, whom she knew, having seen her several times in the convent parlor, and whom she thought a nice girl, notwithstanding what she called her “fly-away airs”—­“the airs they acquire from modern education,” she said to herself, with a sigh.

“Those poor ladies would have us think of nothing but a future life,” said Jacqueline, shrugging her shoulders.