"Parbleu! wretched joker, do you think that I don't recognize it? Come, come, my dear fellow, you must have meant to laugh at me, since you deny everything, even the simplest things. You are the lover of that face!"
"And to prove it, I am going to Montmorency!" said Laurent, coldly, taking his hat.
"That doesn't prove anything!" replied Mercourt.
They went out together, and Mercourt saw Laurent enter a cab; but Laurent went no farther than the Bois de Boulogne, where he dined all alone at a small café, and returned at night-fall, on foot and lost in his thoughts.
The Bois de Boulogne of that time was not what it is to-day. It was smaller, more neglected, poorer, more mysterious, and more like the country; one could reflect there.
On the Champs-Elysées, less splendid and less thickly settled than to-day, were tracts of land newly thrown open to building, where one could hire at a reasonable price small houses with gardens, where perfect privacy was attainable. One could live quietly there and work.
It was in one of those neat white cottages, amid flowering lilacs, and behind a tall hedge of hawthorn with a green gate, that Thérèse lived. It was May. The weather was magnificent. How Laurent found himself, at nine o'clock, behind that hedge, in the lonely, unfinished street where no lanterns had as yet been placed, and where nettles and weeds still flourished along the sides, he himself would have been embarrassed to explain.
The hedge was very thick, and Laurent skirted it noiselessly on all sides, but could see nothing save the golden reflection on the foliage of a light which he supposed to be placed on a small table in the garden by which he was accustomed to sit and smoke when he passed the evening with Thérèse. Was somebody smoking in the garden, or were they taking tea there, as sometimes happened? But Thérèse had informed Laurent that she expected a whole family from the provinces, and he could hear only two voices whispering mysteriously together, one of which seemed to belong to Thérèse. The other voice spoke very low; was it a man's?
Laurent listened until he had a ringing in his ears, and at last he heard, or thought he heard, Thérèse say:
"What does all this matter? I have but one love on earth, and that is you!"