“With this,” she thought, “I can at any moment enrich Aunt Medea without having recourse to Martial.”
After this little scene there was a constant interchange of delicate attentions and touching devotion between the two ladies. It was “my dearest little aunt,” and “my dearly beloved niece,” from morning until night; and the gossips of the neighborhood, who had often commented upon the haughty disdain which Mme. Blanche displayed in her treatment of her relative, would have found abundant food for comment had they known that Aunt Medea was protected from the possibility of cold by a mantle lined with costly fur, exactly like the marquise’s own, and that she made the journey, not in the large Berlin, with the servants, but in the post-chaise with the Marquis and Marquise de Sairmeuse.
The change was so marked that even Martial remarked it, and as soon as he found himself alone with his wife, he exclaimed, in a tone of good-natured raillery:
“What is the meaning of all this devotion? We shall finish by encasing this precious aunt in cotton, shall we not?”
Blanche trembled, and flushed a little.
“I love good Aunt Medea so much!” said she. “I never can forget all the affection and devotion she lavished upon me when I was so unhappy.”
It was such a plausible explanation that Martial took no further notice of the matter, for his mind just then was fully occupied.
The agent, whom he had sent to Paris in advance, to purchase, if possible, the Hotel de Sairmeuse, had written him to make all possible haste, as there was some difficulty about concluding the bargain.
“Plague take the fellow!” said the marquis, angrily, on receiving this news. “He is quite stupid enough to let this opportunity, for which we have been waiting ten years, slip through his fingers. I shall find no pleasure in Paris if I cannot own our old residence.”
He was so impatient to reach Paris that, on the second day of their journey, he declared if he were alone he would travel all night.