Suddenly the Countess said:  “We must leave here soon.”

“Oh, don’t speak of that yet!” Olivier exclaimed.  “You would not leave Roncieres when I was not here; now what I have come, you think only of going away.”

“But, my dear friend,” said she, “we three cannot remain here indefinitely.”

“It does not necessarily follow that we need stay indefinitely, but just a few days.  How many times have I stayed at your house for whole weeks?”

“Yes, but in different circumstances, when the house was open to everyone.”

“Oh, mamma,” said Annette, coaxingly, “let us stay a few days more, just two or three.  He teaches me so well how to play tennis.  It annoys me to lose, but afterward I am glad to have made such progress.”

Only that morning the Countess had been planning to make this mysterious visit of her friend’s last until Sunday, and now she wished to go away, without knowing why.  That day which she had hoped would be such a happy one had left in her soul an inexpressible but poignant sadness, a causeless apprehension, as tenacious and confused as a presentiment.

When she was once more alone in her room she even sought to define this new access of melancholy.

Had she experienced one of those imperceptible emotions whose touch has been so slight that reason does not remember it, but whose vibrations still stir the most sensitive chords of the heart?  Perhaps?  Which?  She recalled, certainly, some little annoyances, in the thousand degrees of sentiment through which she had passed, each minute having its own.  But they were too petty to have thus disheartened her.  “I am exacting,” she thought.  “I have no right to torment myself in this way.”

She opened her window, to breathe the night air, and leaned on the window-sill, gazing at the moon.

A slight noise made her look down.  Olivier was pacing before the castle.  “Why did he say that he was going to his room?” she thought; “why did he not tell me he was going out again?  Why did he not ask me to come with him?  He knows very well that it would have made me so happy.  What is he thinking of now?”

This idea that he had not wished to have her with him on his walk, that he had preferred to go out alone this beautiful night, alone, with a cigar in his mouth, for she could see its fiery-red point—­alone, when he might have given her the joy of taking her with him; this idea that he had not continual need of her, that he did not desire her always, created within her soul a new fermentation of bitterness.

She was about to close the window, that she might not see him or be tempted to call to him, when he raised his eyes and saw her.

“Well, are you star-gazing, Countess?”

“Yes,” she answered.  “You also, as it appears.”

“Oh, I am simply smoking.”

She could not resist the desire to ask:  “Why did you not tell me you were going out?”