“Yes, hell if you like!” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “Here, give me your hand; feel my heart, how it beats. There’s fever in my veins; the whole world is now a mere nothing to me! How many times have I not seen that man in my dreams! Oh! how beautiful his head is—how his eyes sparkle!”
“Will he love you?” said the simple peasant-woman, in a quivering voice, her face full of sad foreboding.
“How can you ask me that!” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “But, Francine, tell me,” she added throwing herself into a pose that was half serious, half comic, “will it be very hard to love me?”
“No, but will he love you always?” replied Francine, smiling.
They looked at each other for a moment speechless,—Francine at revealing so much knowledge of life, and Marie at the perception, which now came to her for the first time, of a future of happiness in her passion. She seemed to herself hanging over a gulf of which she had wanted to know the depth, and listening to the fall of the stone she had flung, at first heedlessly, into it.
“Well, it is my own affair,” she said, with the gesture of a gambler. “I should never pity a betrayed woman; she has no one but herself to blame if she is abandoned. I shall know how to keep, either living or dead, the man whose heart has once been mine. But,” she added, with some surprise and after a moment’s silence, “where did you get your knowledge of love, Francine?”
“Mademoiselle,” said the peasant-woman, hastily, “hush, I hear steps in the passage.”
“Ah! not his steps!” said Marie, listening. “But you are evading an answer; well, well, I’ll wait for it, or guess it.”
Francine was right, however. Three taps on the door interrupted the conversation. Captain Merle appeared, after receiving Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s permission to enter.
With a military salute to the lady, whose beauty dazzled him, the soldier ventured on giving her a glance, but he found nothing better to say than: “Mademoiselle, I am at your orders.”