"No, no, father!" interposed Mario with extraordinary vehemence; "that time will never come for me. I was baptized a Catholic by Abbé Anjorrant; I was brought up in the idea that I ought never to change; and, although he did not ask me to take any oath to it when he was dying, it would seem to me as if I should disobey him by leaving the church in which he put me. Lauriane has set me the example and I will follow it; we will remain as we are, and it will be all right. That will not prevent me from loving her, and if she doesn't love me, she will do wrong and be a bad girl."
"What do you say to that, my child?" queried De Beuvre; "doesn't it strike you that he is the sort of little husband who, when he saw you burning, would say: 'I feel deeply grieved, but I can do nothing, because it is the pope's will?'"
Lauriane and Mario disputed like the children they were; that is to say, their cheeks grew red as fire. Lauriane sulked; Mario did not move an inch, and finally exclaimed with much heat:
"You say, Lauriane, that you would degrade yourself if you should change. Then you would despise me if I changed, would you not?"
Lauriane realized the justness of the retort, and said no more; but she was piqued, like a woman with whom her lover makes conditions, and her glance said to Mario: "I thought that you loved me more than you do."
When she was riding home with her father, he did not fail to say to her:
"Well, my child, do you not see now that Mario, that charming youth, is a Papist of the old stock, like his own father, who served the Spaniard against us? And some day, ashamed of his old uncle's inanity, he will make war on us! Then what will you say, when you see your husband in one camp and your father in the other, shooting bullets at each other, or fighting hand to hand?"
"Really, father," said Lauriane, "you speak as if I had evinced a desire to remain a widow; but I have never determined upon that. I cannot see, however, why Monsieur d'Ars is not equally exposed to the evil fate which you predict. Is not he a Catholic and a devoted partizan of the royal power?"
"Monsieur d'Ars has no will of his own," replied De Beuvre, "and I will answer for it that we shall be able to bend him to all our purposes, on every occasion. More bigoted men than he have changed sides when the prospects of the Reformation seemed bright."
"If Monsieur d'Ars has no will," rejoined Lauriane, "so much the worse for him; he is no man; and yet he is a man in years!"