He could not resist the temptation to ask:
"So you knew Mademoiselle Jacques when she was very young?"
"She was fifteen years old when I first saw her."
Laurent had not the courage to ask him in what year that was. It seemed to him that the blood rushed to his face when he mentioned Thérèse. What did her age matter to him? It was her story that he would have liked to hear. Thérèse did not appear thirty; Palmer might have been no more than her friend. And then his voice was loud and penetrating. If it had been he to whom Thérèse had said: I love no one but you, he would have made some sort of a reply that Laurent would have heard.
At last, the evening came, and the artist, who was not in the habit of being punctual, arrived before the time at which Thérèse usually received him. He found her in her garden, unoccupied, contrary to her custom, and walking back and forth in evident agitation. As soon as she spied him, she went to meet him, and said, taking his hand with an air of authority rather than affection:
"If you are a man of honor, you will tell me all that you heard through this shrubbery. Come, speak; I am listening."
She sat down on a bench, and Laurent, irritated by this unusual reception, tried to worry her by making evasive replies; but she cowed him by her manifest displeasure, and by an expression of the face which was entirely strange to him. The dread of a definitive rupture with her led him to tell her the simple truth.
"So that was all you heard?" she said. "I said to a person whom you did not even see: 'You are now my only love on earth?'"
"Did I dream it, Thérèse? I am ready to believe it, if you bid me."
"No, you did not dream it. I may have said it, nay, I probably did say it. And what was the answer?"