"Oh, yes! so you say," cried Jean Oullier; "but I don't yet believe you mean it."
"Ask Mary," said Bertha, turning to her sister, who was listening, pale and palpitating, to the discussion, as though her life depended on it; "ask my sister, to whom I have opened my heart, and who knows my hopes and fears. Yes, Jean, all concealments, all constraints are hateful to me; and I am glad, especially with you, to have thrown off mine and to speak openly. Well, I tell you boldly, Jean Oullier,--as boldly as I say everything,--I love him!"
"No, no; don't say that, I implore you, Demoiselle Bertha. I am but a poor peasant, but in former days--it is true you were but a little thing--you gave me the right to call you my child; and I have loved you, and I do love you both as no father ever loved his own daughters: well, the old man who watched over you in childhood, who held you on his knee, and rocked you to sleep, night after night, that old man, whose only happiness you are in this low world, flings himself on his knees to say, Don't love that man, I implore you, Bertha!"
"Why not?" she said, impatiently.
"Because,--and I say this from the bottom of my heart, on my soul and conscience,--because a marriage between you and him is an evil thing,--a monstrous, impossible thing!"
"Your attachment to us makes you exaggerate everything, my poor Jean. Monsieur Michel loves me, I believe; I love him, I am sure, and if he bravely accomplishes the task of distinguishing his name, I shall be most happy in becoming his wife."
"Then," said Jean Oullier, in a tone of deep depression, "I must look in my old age for other masters and another home."
"Why?"
"Because Jean Oullier, poor and of no account as he may be, will never make his home with the son of a renegade and a traitor."
"Hush! Jean Oullier, hush!" cried Bertha. "Hush, I say, or I may break your heart."