The Countess ceased to eat, concentrating her thoughts on the man who was approaching, bearer of a few written words that might wound her as if a knife had been thrust in her throat.  The anguish of having known that experience made her breathless, and she tried to guess what this hurried message might be.  About what?  From whom?  The thought of Olivier flashed through her mind.  Was he ill?  Dead, perhaps, too!

The ten minutes she had to wait seemed interminable to her; then, when she had torn open the despatch and recognized the name of her husband, she read:  “I telegraph to tell you that our friend Bertin leaves for Roncieres on the one o’clock train.  Send Phaeton station.  Love.”

“Well, mamma?” said Annette.

“Monsieur Olivier Bertin is coming to see us.”

“Ah, how lucky!  When?”

“Very soon.”

“At four o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, how kind he is!”

But the Countess had turned pale, for a new anxiety had lately troubled her, and the sudden arrival of the painter seemed to her as painful a menace as anything she might have been able to foresee.

“You will go to meet him with the carriage,” she said to her daughter.

“And will you not come, too, mamma?”

“No, I will wait for you here.”

“Why?  That will hurt him.”

“I do not feel very well.”

“You wished to walk as far as Berville just now.”

“Yes, but my breakfast has made me feel ill.”

“You will feel better between now and the time to go.”

“No, I am going up to my room.  Let me know as soon as you arrive.”

“Yes, mamma.”

After giving orders that the phaeton should be ready at the proper hour, and that a room be prepared, the Countess returned to her own room, and shut herself in.

Up to this time her life had passed almost without suffering, affected only by Olivier’s love and concerned only by her anxiety to retain it.  She had succeeded, always victorious in that struggle.  Her heart, soothed by success and by flattery, had become the exacting heart of a beautiful worldly woman to whom are due all the good things of earth, and, after consenting to a brilliant marriage, with which affection had nothing to do, after accepting love later as the complement of a happy existence, after taking her part in a guilty intimacy, largely from inclination, a little from a leaning toward sentiment itself as a compensation for the prosaic hum-drum of daily life, had barricaded itself in the happiness that chance had offered her, with no other desire than to defend it against the surprises of each day.  She had therefore accepted with the complacency of a pretty woman the agreeable events that occurred; and, though she ventured little, and was troubled little by new necessities and desires for the unknown; though she was tender, tenacious, and farseeing, content with the present, but naturally anxious about the morrow, she had known how to enjoy the elements that Destiny had furnished her with wise and economical prudence.