“Then you do love Malaga very much?” she asked.
“I have sacrificed for her the honor that no man should ever sacrifice.”
“What honor?”
“That which we desire to keep at any cost in the eyes of our idol.”
After that reply Thaddeus said no more; he was silent until, as they passed a wooden building on the Champs Elysees, he said, pointing to it, “That is the Circus.”
He went to the Russian Embassy before dinner, and thence to the Foreign office, and the next morning he had started for Havre before the count and countess were up.
“I have lost a friend,” said Adam, with tears in his eyes, when he heard that Paz had gone,—“a friend in the true meaning of the word. I don’t know what has made him abandon me as if a pestilence were in my house. We are not friends to quarrel about a woman,” he said, looking intently at Clementine. “You heard what he said yesterday about Malaga. Well, he has never so much as touched the little finger of that girl.”
“How do you know that?” said Clementine.
“I had the natural curiosity to go and see Mademoiselle Turquet, and the poor girl can’t explain even to herself the absolute reserve which Thad—”
“Enough!” said the countess, retreating into her bedroom. “Can it be that I am the victim of some noble mystification?” she asked herself. The thought had hardly crossed her mind when Constantin brought her the following letter written by Thaddeus during the night:—