CHAPTER IX.
AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.
"Forgive me for having deserted you so unceremoniously, my dear Ernestine," Herminie remarked to her friend. "It was a letter, and I had to send a verbal reply."
"Do pray go on with your story, Herminie," replied Ernestine. "You have no idea how deeply interested I am."
"And it is such a relief to me to tell you my troubles."
"Yes, I was sure it would be," responded Ernestine, with ingenuous tenderness.
"I was just telling you that I learned at Madame Herbaut's little entertainment that this young man's name was Gerald Auvernay. It was M. Olivier who told me so, on introducing him to me."
"What! he knows M. Olivier?"
"They are intimate friends, for Gerald was a soldier in the same regiment as Olivier. On leaving the service, he entered the office of a notary, so he told me, but for some time past he had given up an employment which was so distasteful to him, and had found occupation on the fortifications under an officer of engineers he had known in Africa. So you see, Ernestine, that Gerald's position and mine were identical, and free as he seemed to be, I was surely excusable for allowing myself to yield to a fatal fondness for him."
"But why fatal, Herminie?"
"Wait and you shall know all. Two days after our meeting at Madame Herbaut's, on my return from my lessons, I went out into the garden to which my landlord had kindly given me the entrée. This garden, as you can see from the window, is separated from the street in the rear only by a hedge, and from the bench on which I had seated myself I saw Gerald pass. Instead of being handsomely dressed as on the evening before, he was clad in a gray blouse and a big straw hat. He gave a start of surprise on perceiving me, but far from seeming mortified at being seen in his working clothes, he bowed to me and, pausing, said gaily that he was just returning from his day's work, being engaged in superintending certain portions of the fortifications now in progress of construction at the end of the Rue de Monceau. 'An occupation which suits me much better than dull notary work,' he remarked. 'I am fairly well paid and I have a crowd of rather rough but very worthy men to superintend. I like it much better than copying stupid documents.'"