Here Madame Branchard, in whom all feelings were subordinate to curiosity and motherhood, had approached until she stood directly behind the two on the terrace. Tears had sprung to her eyes and she sniffled and wiped them frankly away with her hand.
Bulstrode, singularly relieved by her appearance, turned and asked her, "What does she then know?"
"Nothing, m'sieur, nothing at all."
Simone got up on her feet and her big doll fell with a crash on the marble of the terrace and broke in a dozen pieces, but the catastrophe did not touch her.
"And maman?" she repeated. "Where is she? She did not come home last night?"
Bulstrode had descended to one knee in order to approach her, but Madame Branchard got down on both knees and tenderly put her arms around the child.
"Look, ma petite—your mother has gone away forever to a beautiful country, and she has left you here to be a good girl and do whatever this kind gentleman says. Will you go to be his little girl? He will give you everything in the world." She closed with this magnificent promise, whose breadth and wealth no child-mind could grasp. In order to give her more complete liberty in which to make her decision the wine-merchant's wife, after kissing her, set her free.
Simone made no audible reflection of wonder at her seeming desertion, no exhibition of distress, no melodramatic outburst of grief or surprise. She stood silent, absorbed, desolate, and ashamed, twisting in and out between her frail little fingers the fringe of Madame Branchard's black shawl.
"Or," brightly continued the good woman, "you can come home with me and play with Marie and Jeannette and have what we have. You can be my little girl, as you will—it is for you to decide—chez moi, or with this bon monsieur."
Was it fair of them—thus to lay on her six years the burden of her own destiny?