"Let us return, shall we?" she asked.
She called to the coachman: "Rue Prony!" while Sulpice, whom she unwillingly took with her, though he wearily yawned, seized her hand and said as he sneezed:
"Ah! how kind you are!"
The next day, Marianne rang the bell of Lissac's house in Rue d'Aumale, a little before the appointed hour.
"Punctual as a creditor!" she thought.
She reached Guy's, ready for anything. She was very pale and charming in her light costume, and she entered as one would go into a fray with head high. She would not leave the place until she had recovered her letters.
It was only for those scraps of paper that she again, as it were, bound and tied herself to her past; she wished to cut herself away from it and to tear them to pieces with her teeth. But what if Guy should refuse to give them up to her? That could not be possible, although he was sincerely attached to Rosas. Still, between gratitude to a woman and duty to a friend, a man might hesitate, when he is a corrupted Parisian like Lissac.
"His affection for José will not carry him to the length of forgetting all that I have given him of myself!" Marianne thought.
Then shrugging her shoulders:
"After all, these men have such a freemasonry between them, as he said!—And they speak of our fraternity, we women!—It is nothing compared with theirs!"