Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.
And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was. Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming—that mouth, her pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flower-like flesh perfumed with youth. Would he—would he know the first cool touch of those young lips ... he found that he could see her no more, for a mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through the mist towards where she sat.
Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman—Maman who looked at him in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded her head once, reassuringly. She looked as she had when he was a little boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his. Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help him towards his happiness. She too had succumbed to Marise. Who would not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came upon him.
Madame Garnier knew very well beforehand when the little American girl was to come on the program, and after that ill-bred, over-dressed Yvonne Bredier had wriggled and grinned her way off the stage, she felt an anxious, nervous expectation. Jean-Pierre had no idea what was coming. She could feel that. Although she dared not change her position to look at him, she was acutely aware of the relaxed careless pose of his body, and of the nonchalant turn of his head as he glanced at the girl who now came forward on the stage.
And then she felt with that sixth sense of her passion for Jean-Pierre that he had been struck, had been pierced, as though a knife had thrust him through and through. Although he had not moved—because he had not moved, had not changed a line of his careless attitude, she divined that he had been stricken into immobility. What was it? Was it the shock of disillusion, of disappointment at prosaic reality after a long, romantic dream? Or did he still find in the girl whatever strange sorcery had so bewitched his boyish fancy?
She herself sat as stiffly motionless as he, suffering so exquisite a torture of suspense that she dared not bring herself to end it by a look at his face.
Some one back of her coughed, and the sound broke the spell. She drew a long breath and resolutely turned her head towards her son.
"Oh, my Jean-Pierre, oh, my little boy! is it so you feel? Oh, my darling, do you want her, do you want anything in the world like that? My little boy, a man! To think that it is my little boy, thus burning with a man's desire! Oh, yes, Jean-Pierre, you shall have her ... what is your mother for but to help you have what you want? Oh, poor boy, poor boy, to look at any woman so.... Oh, Jean-Pierre, if you knew women, how they only live to fool men ... no woman on earth is worth...."
She saw now that his flaming young eyes were veiled with tears. She touched his arm, she smiled at him, closer to him than since his early childhood. And he took her hand, he smiled back, he looked at her as he had not once since his infatuation began—like her son, her only son once more letting her into his heart. She held tightly to his hand, now happy and at peace.