Sidonie seldom took part in these maternal promenades.  She said that the chatter of children tired her, and therein she agreed with old Gardinois, who seized upon any pretext to annoy his granddaughter.  He believed that he accomplished that object by devoting himself exclusively to Sidonie, and arranging even more entertainments for her than on her former visit.  The carriages that had been shut up in the carriage-house for two years, and were dusted once a week because the spiders spun their webs on the silk cushions, were placed at her disposal.  The horses were harnessed three times a day, and the gate was continually turning on its hinges.  Everybody in the house followed this impulse of worldliness.  The gardener paid more attention to his flowers because Madame Risler selected the finest ones to wear in her hair at dinner.  And then there were calls to be made.  Luncheon parties were given, gatherings at which Madame Fromont Jeune presided, but at which Sidonie, with her lively manners, shone supreme.  Indeed, Claire often left her a clear field.  The child had its hours for sleeping and riding out, with which no amusements could interfere.  The mother was compelled to remain away, and it often happened that she was unable to go with Sidonie to meet the partners when they came from Paris at night.

“You will make my excuses,” she would say, as the went up to her room.

Madame Risler was triumphant.  A picture of elegant indolence, she would drive away behind the galloping horses, unconscious of the swiftness of their pace, without a thought in her mind.

Other carriages were always waiting at the station.  Two or three times she heard some one near her whisper, “That is Madame Fromont Jeune,” and, indeed, it was a simple matter for people to make the mistake, seeing the three return together from the station, Sidonie sitting beside Georges on the back seat, laughing and talking with him, and Risler facing them, smiling contentedly with his broad hands spread flat upon his knees, but evidently feeling a little out of place in that fine carriage.  The thought that she was taken for Madame Fromont made her very proud, and she became a little more accustomed to it every day.  On their arrival at the chateau, the two families separated until dinner; but, in the presence of his wife sitting tranquilly beside the sleeping child, Georges Fromont, too young to be absorbed by the joys of domesticity, was continually thinking of the brilliant Sidonie, whose voice he could hear pouring forth triumphant roulades under the trees in the garden.

While the whole chateau was thus transformed in obedience to the whims of a young woman, old Gardinois continued to lead the narrow life of a discontented, idle, impotent ‘parvenu’.  The most successful means of distraction he had discovered was espionage.  The goings and comings of his servants, the remarks that were made about him in the kitchen, the basket of fruit and vegetables brought every morning from the kitchen-garden to the pantry, were objects of continual investigation.