“‘I am coming to the theatre to-day,’ he said, but in a very low voice.
“‘Have I not forbidden it?’ she exclaimed.
“‘The greater reason that I should come. I love you the most when you forbid things. And I have a week’s leave. It will be a week in the theatre. You will not make me unhappy, Christine?’
“He bent down and kissed her hand, and I saw that she did not draw it back when his lips touched it.
“That night, excellency, my letter went to the priest at Jézero.
“‘Trouble yourself not at all about Christine,’ I wrote, ‘for fortune has been very kind to her here, where, if my old eyes do not deceive me, she has both a husband and a lover.’
“‘It was a lie!’ you say. Aye, surely; yet for the child’s sake I lied then, as I would lie to-day, to-morrow, and to the end of time. For what service would it have been to her to have snatched her from her triumphs in the city and to have immured her in the gloomy house of the Zaloskis? Nay, I knew that it would be none, and I could have danced for joy when I put my letter into the box.
“‘Now indeed,’ cried I, ‘will they have cause to remember old Andrea, whom they turned from their door in the day of his necessity.’”