When she rose the next day, her plan was formed.  Georges loved her; that was certain.  Did he contemplate marrying her?  She had a suspicion that he did not, the clever minx!  But that did not frighten her.  She felt strong enough to triumph over that childish nature, at once weak and passionate.  She had only to resist him, and that is exactly what she did.

For some days she was cold and indifferent, wilfully blind and devoid of memory.  He tried to speak to her, to renew the blissful moment, but she avoided him, always placing some one between them.

Then he wrote to her.

He carried his notes himself to a hollow in a rock near a clear spring called “The Phantom,” which was in the outskirts of the park, sheltered by a thatched roof.  Sidonie thought that a charming episode.  In the evening she must invent some story, a pretext of some sort for going to “The Phantom” alone.  The shadow of the trees across the path, the mystery of the night, the rapid walk, the excitement, made her heart beat deliciously.  She would find the letter saturated with dew, with the intense cold of the spring, and so white in the moonlight that she would hide it quickly for fear of being surprised.

And then, when she was alone, what joy to open it, to decipher those magic characters, those words of love which swam before her eyes, surrounded by dazzling blue and yellow circles, as if she were reading her letter in the bright sunlight.

“I love you!  Love me!” wrote Georges in every conceivable phrase.

At first she did not reply; but when she felt that he was fairly caught, entirely in her power, she declared herself concisely: 

“I never will love any one but my husband.”

Ah! she was a true woman already, was little Chebe.

CHAPTER V

HOW LITTLE CHEBE’S STORY ENDED

Meanwhil September arrived.  The hunting season brought together a large, noisy, vulgar party at the chateau.  There were long dinners at which the wealthy bourgeois lingered slothfully and wearily, prone to fall asleep like peasants.  They went in carriages to meet the returning hunters in the cool air of the autumn evening.  The mist arose from the fields, from which the crops had been gathered; and while the frightened game flew along the stubble with plaintive cries, the darkness seemed to emerge from the forests whose dark masses increased in size, spreading out over the fields.

The carriage lamps were lighted, the hoods raised, and they drove quickly homeward with the fresh air blowing in their faces.  The dining-hall, brilliantly illuminated, was filled with gayety and laughter.

Claire Fromont, embarrassed by the vulgarity of those about her, hardly spoke at all.  Sidonie was at her brightest.  The drive had given animation to her pale complexion and Parisian eyes.  She knew how to laugh, understood a little too much, perhaps, and seemed to the male guests the only woman in the party.  Her success completed Georges’s intoxication; but as his advances became more pronounced, she showed more and more reserve.  Thereupon he determined that she should be his wife.  He swore it to himself, with the exaggerated emphasis of weak characters, who seem always to combat beforehand the difficulties to which they know that they must yield some day.