“No,” answered Diane, “I am so much in love with you that I don’t want to bully you into anything; only it is marriage or nothing. I don’t know why I say this, or feel this, but I tell you it is as fixed as the stars. You have a power over me so far and no farther.”
Diane, as she said this, laid her head contentedly on the Marquis’ shoulder, and his lips sought hers.
And so half an hour passed in the reproaches and confessions of the woman who loves and the man who pretends he loves. The mist was growing colder and more dense. It was as if they were alone in a white, mysterious, soundless world inhabited only by themselves.
Presently, as Diane lay on the Marquis’ breast, there sounded afar off the faint echo of a church bell from the other world which they had forgotten. At the sound, Diane suddenly and violently wrenched herself from the Marquis’ arms and stood upon her feet. Two thoughts raced through her mind, one equally as important as the other. The first was the reproach of the church bell that she had allowed the Marquis to kiss her lips and put his arm about her. And the second was the iron discipline of the stage which drags men and women apart when it seems like the tearing of a heart in two; which calls them from death-beds; which makes them report at the theatre when they are more dead than alive.
“There is the cathedral bell,” cried Diane in a choking voice, “and it tells me that I have been a wicked girl, and that I may be late for the performance.”
The Marquis stood up too, laughing at the jumble of ideas in Diane’s mind, but the next moment she was gone, speeding in and out of the maze. In her agitation and the white gloom of the mist she lost her way, and the Marquis, following her, though unable to find her, could hear her sobbing on the other side of the hedge as she ran wildly about trying to find the outlet. At last, however, she escaped and was in the open path running toward the park gates.
The Marquis took his way leisurely after her, not smiling like a successful lover, but grinding his teeth and cursing both her and himself. Was it possible that this presumptuous, impudent little creature meant to force him to marry her?
Diane got back to her lodging in time for supper with the Grandins, Jean, and François. François amused and delighted them all, telling them of his interview with the Bishop.
“To-morrow,” François said, “I shall be breakfasting in distinguished company, with the Bishop. He asked me, and I accepted, you may depend upon it.”
“What an advertisement!” cried Grandin, with an eye to business. “If only you could manage to get it into the newspapers!”