“I do not really understand you,” I replied—and I was telling the plain truth. Then she deliberately resumed:
“Your assiduities in this house are being interpreted, by the most respectable and the least suspicious persons, in such a manner that I find myself obliged, both in the interest of my establishment and in the interest of Mademoiselle Alexandre, to see that they end at once.”
“Madame,” I cried, “I have heard a great many silly things in my life, but never anything so silly as what you have just said!”
She answered me quietly,
“Your words of abuse will not affect me in the slightest. When one has a duty to accomplish, one is strong enough to endure all.”
And she pressed her pelerine over her heart once more—not perhaps on this occasion to restrain, but doubtless only to caress that generous heart.
“Madame,” I said, shaking my finger at her, “you have wantonly aroused the indignation of an aged man. Be good enough to act in such a fashion that the old man may be able at least to forget your existence, and do not add fresh insults to those which I have already sustained from your lips. I give you fair warning that I shall never cease to look after Mademoiselle Alexandre; and that should you attempt to do her any harm, in any manner whatsoever, you will have serious reason to regret it!”
The more I became excited, the more she became cool; and she answered in a tone of superb indifference:
“Monsieur, I am much too well informed in regard to the nature of the interest which you take in this young girl, not to withdraw her immediately from that very surveillance with which you threaten me. After observing the more than equivocal intimacy in which you are living with your housekeeper, I ought to have taken measures at once to render it impossible for you ever to come into contact with an innocent child. In the future I shall certainly do it. If up to this time I have been too trustful, it is for Mademoiselle Alexandre, and not for you, to reproach me with it. But she is too artless and too pure—thanks to me!—ever to have suspected the nature of that danger into which you were trying to lead her. I scarcely suppose that you will place me under the necessity of enlightening her upon the subject.”
“Come, my poor old Bonnard,” I said to myself, as I shrugged my shoulders—“so you had to live as long as this in order to learn for the first time exactly what a wicked woman is. And now your knowledge of the subject is complete.”