Was it accidental or intended? The little cousin and the Baron were sitting side by side at a distance sufficiently great to prevent our overhearing each other. Leaning towards her, he talked and laughed incessantly, with the gay, rejuvenated face of an accepted lover.
From time to time he looked at us, slyly, and we nodded and smiled back.
"A jolly girl, the little one, isn't she?" remarked the Baroness.
"It seems so," I answered, uncertain how to take her remark.
"She knows how to cheer up my melancholy husband. I don't possess that gift," she added, with a frank and kindly smile at the group.
And as she spoke the lines of her face betrayed suppressed sorrow, tears held back, superhuman resignation; across her features glided, cloud-like, those incomprehensible reflections of kindness, resignation and self-denial, common to pregnant women and young mothers.
Ashamed of my misinterpretation of her character, tortured by remorse, nervous, I suppressed with difficulty the tears which I felt rising to my eyes.
"But aren't you jealous?" I asked, merely for the sake of saying something.
"Not at all," she answered, quite sincerely and without a trace of malice. "Perhaps you'll think it strange, but it's true. I love my husband; he is very kind-hearted; and I appreciate the little one, for she's a nice girl. And there is really nothing wrong between them. Shame on jealousy, which makes a woman look plain; at my age one has to be careful."
And, indeed, she looked so plain at that moment that it wrung my heart. Acting thoughtlessly, on impulse, I advised her, with fatherly solicitude, to put a shawl round her shoulders, pretending that I was afraid of her catching cold. She let me arrange the fleecy fabric round her face, framing it, and transforming her into a dainty beauty.