“We all looked on Cathelineau as equal to the best among us,” answered Agatha.  “We all strove to see who should show him most honour.”

The old woman sat silent for a while, turning her wheel with great violence, and then she moved abruptly round, and facing Agatha, said: 

“Will you answer me one question truly, Mademoiselle?”

Agatha said she would.

“Are you betrothed as yet to your lover?”

“No, indeed,” answered she; “I am not betrothed.”

“And now answer me another question.  Suppose this son of mine, who, as you say, was as great as the greatest among you, and as noble as the noblest; suppose he had admired your beauty, and had offered to take you home to his mother as the wife of his bosom, how would you then have answered him?  What would you then have thought of the postillion?  Would he then have been the equal of gay young counts, and high-blooded marquises?”

Agatha at first made no reply, and a ruby blush suffused her whole face.  She was not at all unwilling that Cathelineau’s mother should know the feeling which she had entertained for her son, but the abruptness, and the tone of the question, took her by surprise, and for a moment scattered her thoughts.

“Now I have made you angry, Mademoiselle,” said the other, chuckling at the success of her scheme.  “Now you are wrath that I should have dared to suppose that the daughter of a Marquis could have looked, in the way of love, on a poor labourer who had been born and bred in a hovel like this.”

“You mistake me, my friend; I am not angry—­I am anything but angry.”

“You would have scorned him as a loathsome reptile, which to touch would be an abomination,” continued the old woman, not noticing, in her eagerness, Agatha’s denial.  “You would have run from him in disgust, and the servants would have let loose the dogs at him, or have chained him as a madman.  Yes, your delicate frame shakes with horror at the idea, that a filthy stable boy could have looked on your beauty, and have dared to wish to possess it:  and yet you presume to tell me that Cathelineau was among you as an equal:  he was with you as a Jew is among Christians, as a slobbering drunkard among sober men, as one stricken with fever among the healthy.  My son should have been too proud to have eaten bread at a table where his hand was thought unclean, or to have accepted favours, where he dared not look for love.”

“You are unjust to Cathelineau,” replied Agatha.  “You are in every way unjust, both to your son and to me.  He accepted no favour from us, but he did—­but he did look—­” and she paused, as though she still lacked courage to speak the words which were on her tongue, but after a moment she went on and said, “he did look for love, and he did not look in vain.”

“He did love, do you say, and not in vain!  He did love, and made his love acceptable to one of those fine flaunting ladies who sit at ease all day, twirling a few bits of silk with their small white hands.  Do you say such a one as that loved Cathelineau!  Who was she?  What is her name?  Where is she?”