"I sometimes think you take me for one of your old convent friends," he said one day, when she had prattled to him of her housekeeping and her garden as they walked up and down the long grass alley, while the music of the organ came to them, now loud with the lessening distance, now sinking slowly to silence as they walked further from the house.
"Oh no; I should never take you for any one so patrician and distinguished as Laure de Beauvais, or Athenaïs de Laroche," she answered laughingly, "I should never dare to talk to them about eggs and butter, the obstinacy of a cook at twenty-five pounds a year, the ignorance of a gardener who is little better than a day labourer. But perhaps I am wrong to talk to you of these everyday cares. I will try to talk as I would to Athenaïs. I will dispute the merit of Lamartine's Elegy on Byron as compared with Hugo's Ode to the King of Rome. I was for Hugo; Athenaïs for Lamartine. We used to have terrible battles. And now Athenaïs is married to a financier, and has a palace in the Parc Monceau, and gives balls to all Paris; and I am living with father in a shabby old house with three maids and a man-of-all-work."
"Talk to me as you like," he said; "talk to me as your serf, your slave."
And then, without a moment's pause in which to arrange his thoughts, surprised into a revelation which he had intended indefinitely to defer, he told her that he was in very truth her slave, and that he must be the most miserable of men if this avowal of his love touched no answering chord in her heart.
She who was habitually so gay grew suddenly grave almost to sadness, and looked at him with an expression which was half-frightened, half-reproachful.
"Oh, why do you talk like this?" she cried. "We have been such friends—so happy."
"Shall we be less friendly or less happy when we are lovers?"
That word "when" touched her keen sense of the ridiculous.
"When we are lovers!" she echoed, smiling at him. "You take everything for granted."
"I have no alternative between confidence and despair."