At last the three are on the narrow staircase.
“Good night,” said Clarisse; “I am dying with sleep.”
But her eyes were very bright. Jack put his foot on his ladder, but Zénaïde’s room was so crowded with her gifts and purchases, that it seemed to him a most auspicious occasion to pass them in review. Friends had had them under examination, and they were still displayed on the commode: some silver spoons, a prayer-book, gloves, and all about tumbled bits of paper and the colored ribbon that had fastened these gifts from the château; then came the more humble presents from the wives of the employés. Zénaïde showed them all with pride. The boy uttered exclamations of wonder. “But what shall I give her?” he said to himself over and over again.
“And my trousseau, Jack, you have not seen it! Wait, and I will show it to you.”
With a quaint old key she opened the carved wardrobe that had been in the family for a hundred years; the two doors swung open, a delicious violet perfume filled the room, and Jack could see and admire the piles of sheets spun by the first Madame Rondic, and the ruffled and fluted linen piled in snowy masses.
In fact, Jack had never seen such a display. His mother’s wardrobe held laces and fine embroideries, not household articles. Then, lifting a heavy pile, she showed Jack a casket. “Guess what is in this,” Zénaïde said, with a laugh; “it contains my dowry, my dear little dowry, that in a fortnight will belong to M. Maugin. Ah, when I think of it, I could sing and dance with joy!”
And the girl held out her skirts with each hand, and executed an elephantine gambol, shaking the casket she still held in her hand. Suddenly she stopped; some one had rapped on the wall.
“Let the boy go to bed,” said her stepmother in an irritated tone; “you know he must be up early.”
A little ashamed, the future Madame Maugin shut her wardrobe, and said good night to Jack, who ascended his ladder; and five minutes later the little house, wrapped in snow and rocked by the wind, slept like its neighbors in the silence of the night.
There is no light in the parlor of the Rondic mansion save that which comes from the fitful gleam of the dying fire in the chimney. A woman sat there, and at her feet knelt a man in vehement supplication.