Francezka, with her white scarf about her dark head, listened in her favorite attitude, her cheek upon her hand; listened with an air that would have made any man’s heart beat the quicker for it.
We did not leave the garden until late, and then it was time for us to go back to the Manoir Cheverny. On the way through the park and fields, under the harvest moon, Gaston Cheverny raved as only lovers rave; but I, of all men, excused him, knowing the object of his love.
The time sped away during that fortnight, albeit I was separated from Count Saxe. We saw the ladies at the château of Capello daily. The extraordinary kindness of Mademoiselle Capello toward me rather increased. It seemed as if she lay bare her mind, her heart, her soul, to me. I was not, and never could be, her lover, but I was her friend. I found out many things about her that I did not know before. One was—whether it were a defect or not I do not know—she had few intimates. She was not only so differently placed, but so different in herself from most young creatures of her age, that she had not much in common with them. She confessed to me more than once that she had been disappointed in feminine friendships.
“When I think I have found a friend and companion I invariably find in the background a brother or a cousin—some one who wants to rule here,” she said to me one day.
“And whenever you find one of the other sex who seems to know what friendship is, does he not also resolve himself into a lover after a while?” I asked.
Francezka laughed and blushed.
“All, except you,” she answered. “That is why I turn to you with so much confidence, Babache. You alone of the whole wide world, as I know it, can I call my friend, without any admixture of love or flattery. You 225 alone ever found fault with me, or told me my way was not a reasonable way.”
“But I can not now recall ever having dared to find fault with you, Mademoiselle,” I said, cudgeling my brains.
“Oh, it matters not exactly in words; but I know you would find fault with me, if you thought I was wrong, and would tell me so, though I can not bear to be told of my faults—and so I love you”—and then she laughed, as I did, at her own peculiar logic.