"In that case, my memory is better than yours, Monsieur de Buxieres.
To-day, my suspicions have become certainties. You are in love with
Reine Vincart!"
"I?" faintly protested his cousin.
"Don't deny it, but rather, give me your confidence; you will not be sorry for it. You love Reine, and have loved her for a long while. You have succeeded in hiding it from me because it is hard for you to unbosom yourself; but, yesterday, I saw it quite plainly. You dare not affirm the contrary!"
Julien, greatly agitated, had hidden his face in his hands. After a moment's silence, he replied, defiantly: "Well, and supposing it is so? What is the use of talking about it, since Reine's affections are placed elsewhere?"
"Oh! that's another matter. Reine has declined to have me, and I really think she has some other affair in her head. Yet, to confess the truth, the clerk at the iron-works was a lover of my own imagining; she never thought of him."
"Then why did you tell such a lie?" cried Julien, impetuously.
"Because I thought I would plead the lie to get at the truth. Forgive me for having made use of this old trick to put you on the right track. It wasn't such a bad idea, for I succeeded in finding out what you took so much pains to hide from me."
"To hide from you? Yes, I did wish to hide it from you. Wasn't that right, since I was convinced that Reine loved you?" exclaimed Julien, in an almost stifled voice, as if the avowal were choking him. "I have always thought it idle to parade one's feelings before those who do not care about them."
"You were wrong," returned poor Claudet, sighing deeply, "if you had spoken for yourself, I have an idea you would have been better received, and you would have spared me a terrible heart-breaking."
He said it with such profound sadness that Julien, notwithstanding the absorbing nature of his own thoughts, was quite overcome, and almost on the point of confessing, openly, the intensity of his feeling toward Reine Vincart. But, accustomed as he was, by long habit, to concentrate every emotion within himself, he found it impossible to become, all at once, communicative; he felt an invincible and almost maidenly bashfulness at the idea of revealing the secret sentiments of his soul, and contented himself with saying, in a low voice: