“Let us go home, father,” she said, rising from the hillock on which they were sitting. “Papa, hear me, I swear before God to obey your wishes, whatever they may be, in the affair of my marriage.”
“Then you don’t love him any longer?” asked her father.
“I loved an honest man, with no falsehood on his face, upright as yourself, incapable of disguising himself like an actor, with the paint of another man’s glory on his cheeks.”
“You said nothing could change you”; remarked the colonel, ironically.
“Ah, do not trifle with me!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands and looking at her father in distressful anxiety; “don’t you see that you are wringing my heart and destroying my beliefs with your jokes.”
“God forbid! I have told you the exact truth.”
“You are very kind, father,” she said after a pause, and with a sort of solemnity.
“He has kept your letters,” resumed the colonel; “now suppose the rash caresses of your soul had fallen into the hands of one of those poets who, as Dumay says, light their cigars with them?”
“Oh!—you are going too far.”
“Canalis told him so.”