It was the happiest moment of little Chebe’s life.  Even aside from any ambitious project, her coquettish, false nature found a strange fascination in this intrigue, carried on mysteriously amid banquets and merry-makings.

No one about them suspected anything.  Claire was at that healthy and delightful period of youth when the mind, only partly open, clings to the things it knows with blind confidence, in complete ignorance of treachery and falsehood.  M. Fromont thought of nothing but his business.  His wife polished her jewels with frenzied energy.  Only old Gardinois and his little, gimlet-like eyes were to be feared; but Sidonie entertained him, and even if he had discovered anything, he was not the man to interfere with her future.

Her hour of triumph was near, when a sudden, unforeseen disaster blasted her hopes.

One Sunday morning M. Fromont was brought back fatally wounded from a hunting expedition.  A bullet intended for a deer had pierced his temple.  The chateau was turned upside-down.

All the hunters, among them the unknown bungler that had fired the fatal shot, started in haste for Paris.  Claire, frantic with grief, entered the room where her father lay on his deathbed, there to remain; and Risler, being advised of the catastrophe, came to take Sidonie home.

On the night before her departure she had a final meeting with Georges at The Phantom,—­a farewell meeting, painful and stealthy, and made solemn by the proximity of death.  They vowed, however, to love each other always; they agreed upon a method of writing to each other.  Then they parted.

It was a sad journey home.

Sidonie returned abruptly to her every-day life, escorted by the despairing grief of Risler, to whom his dear master’s death was an irreparable loss.  On her arrival, she was compelled to describe her visit to the smallest detail; discuss the inmates of the chateau, the guests, the entertainments, the dinners, and the final catastrophe.  What torture for her, when, absorbed as she was by a single, unchanging thought, she had so much need of silence and solitude!  But there was something even more terrible than that.

On the first day after her return Frantz resumed his former place; and the glances with which he followed her, the words he addressed to her alone, seemed to her exasperating beyond endurance.

Despite all his shyness and distrust of himself, the poor fellow believed that he had some rights as an accepted and impatient lover, and little Chebe was obliged to emerge from her dreams to reply to that creditor, and to postpone once more the maturity of his claim.

A day came, however, when indecision ceased to be possible.  She had promised to marry Frantz when he had obtained a good situation; and now an engineer’s berth in the South, at the smelting-furnaces of Grand Combe, was offered to him.  That was sufficient for the support of a modest establishment.