"Ah!" he said, "You still see Guy."
"I!—I had not spoken a single word to him until I asked him to have an invitation sent me for this soirée, and then it was merely because I knew you would be here."
"Ah!" said José again, without adding a word.
Marianne was satisfied. She knew now that the duke still loved her, since the mention of Lissac's name had made him tremble. Well! she had shrewdly understood her Rosas.
"And what have you been doing, my dear duke, for such an age?" she said.
She looked at him as she had looked at Vaudrey, with her sweet and shrewd smile, which moved him profoundly, and her glance penetrated to the inmost depths of his being.
"You know the old saying: 'I have lived.' It is great folly, perhaps, but it is the truth."
"And I wager," boldly said Marianne, "that you have never thought of me."
"Of you?"
"Of me. Of that mad Marianne, who is the maddest creature of all those you have met in your travels from the North Pole to Cambodia, but who has by no means a wicked heart, although a sufficiently unhappy one, and that has never ceased to beat a little too rapidly at certain reminiscences which you do not recall, perhaps—who knows?"