These words came naturally to her lips at the very moment when she was breaking her daughter’s heart. But Alice, leaning on the motherly shoulder, saw through the open window a woman in heavy mourning, coming down the avenue towards the house. Slow and bent, Madame Guibert was coming confidently to ask her hand for Marcel. At this sight the girl shuddered and released herself from her mother’s embrace.
“She has no warning of what is coming,” she thought. “It is too late. Poor, poor woman!”
Madame Dulaurens, astonished and made uneasy again by her daughter’s face, was thinking, “Can she be on the point of changing her mind a second time?”
Alice had left the window to avoid the painful sight.
“How she will suffer! I won’t do it! I won’t!” she said to herself, a prey to despair and dragging herself from one chair to another.
Pity dominated her, even in the ruin of her shattered dream of love. To retard the inevitable blow hanging over this poor woman, already so bowed down under the burden of fate, she did not even remind her mother from whom the fatal refusal ought to come. She kept her near her with idle words. No doubt her father would procrastinate, would decline to give any definite reply. Like all weak people, who were content with the smallest successes, she wished only to spare Madame Guibert too sudden a blow, and would not admit to herself that she felt already incapable of saving her, though she had been the first to weep over it and must weep over it for the rest of her life.
After several minutes of anxious expectation Madame Guibert was announced in the drawing-room.
“I will go to her,” said Madame Dulaurens, and, kissing the daughter whom she was sacrificing, she went out of the room. Scarcely was the door shut when Alice, her heart beating wildly, sprang forward and with trembling hands tried in vain to open it.
“Mamma,” she cried through the partition, “I love him, I love him! Say yes, I beg of you.”
She opened the door at last. But the corridor was empty. Madame Dulaurens had gone. She had heard that last heartrending cry. Accustomed to treating the girl as a child who must be governed, she attached no importance to this. Calmly, without compunction, fully persuaded that she was acting as a tender and devoted mother, she went down to receive Madame Guibert and when she entered the drawing-room, she had already prepared the polite and amiable formula of her refusal.