"So you turn me out," said Laurent, "and it is all over between us?"
"It is all over, adieu!" replied Thérèse in a severe tone.
Laurent left the house in a rage which made it impossible for him to say a word; but he had not taken thirty steps in the street, when he returned, telling Catherine that he had forgotten to deliver a message which somebody had given him for her mistress. He found Thérèse sitting in a small salon; the garden door was still open; she seemed to have gone so far, and to have paused there, grieved and downcast, absorbed in her reflections. She received him frigidly.
"So you have come back?" she said; "what is it that you forgot?"
"I forgot to tell you the truth."
"I no longer care to hear it."
"But you asked me for it?"
"I thought that you might tell it spontaneously."
"And I might have, I should have; I was wrong not to do it. Look you, Thérèse, do you think it possible for a man of my age to see you without falling in love with you?"
"In love?" said Thérèse, with a frown. "So you were making sport of me, were you, when you told me that you could not fall in love with any woman?"