The General was silenced for the time, but Mathilde gave him privately some valuable information. It was true that whenever she came into the study François was always talking about his soul, and his desire to repent. But as soon as her back was turned she could hear sounds of laughter—François was none too good to be laughing at her—and sometimes she thought she heard the patter of feet, like dancing. It could not be his Grace. If the General could pay an unexpected call some day after François had breakfasted at the palace—
The General took the hint, and one day when he had seen François going into the palace arm in arm with the Bishop, the General bided his time. When he knew breakfast was over, he unceremoniously opened the door of the Bishop’s study. Mathilde was close behind him. There sat the Bishop in his great arm-chair, his hands crossed upon his waistcoat his mouth open as if it were on hinges, while François, in a ballet costume improvised from a table-cloth, was doing a beautiful skirt dance and carolling at the top of his lungs one of the gayest of the music hall songs. The entrance of the General was like a paralytic shock. The Bishop forgot to close his mouth, and François stood with one leg in the air.
“Good morning, brother,” said General Bion sarcastically. “So this is bringing M. le Bourgeois to penitence and reforming his wandering life. I am afraid he is laying up material for you as a penitent.”
The poor Bishop knew not where to look nor what to say, but François, with unblushing impudence, ran behind the General, caught Mathilde in his arms, and proceeded to do a high kicking waltz with her, in spite of her screams and protests and fighting like a tiger. Not even the General could stand that with gravity; he laughed in spite of himself. After that day, when François breakfasted at the palace the General had a way of dropping in, and there would be an audience of two instead of one to the antics of François in the good Bishop’s study.
Meanwhile, things went on in the lodgings opposite the Hotel Metropole without the slightest change. The Marquis still haunted the place, and Diane still gave him rare interviews in the presence of Madame Grandin. François chaffed her unmercifully about this prudery, but Jean encouraged her.
“Don’t let that man see you alone,” said Jean sternly to Diane. “A marquis and a cheap music-hall singer is a bad combination.”
“It is because you are jealous, Jean,” said Diane frankly, at which Jean looked at her with an expression so piteous, so heartrending, in his honest eyes, that even Diane was touched.
One afternoon about three weeks after Diane’s adventure in the maze with the Marquis, it was the same sort of an afternoon, the white fog from the river enveloping the town like a muslin veil, and making a mysterious light that was neither day nor night, darkness nor light.
Diane, on going out for her walk, determined to live over that hour of tumultuous joy in the maze, to indulge her imagination in the notion that there she should meet the Marquis. She started out, therefore, tripping lightly along, and made straight for the park. Once more she entered the wide driveway, half veiled in the floating white mist, and with an unerring instinct, she found the opening to the maze. As she walked between the tall, green walls of the clipped cedars, she felt a hand laid on her shoulder, and looking up, there was Egmont, his military cap sitting, as ever, jauntily on his handsome head, his cavalry cloak draped about him like the mantle of a young Greek.
“I caught sight of you as you came out of the house, and I followed you here. Don’t you suppose that I have lived over in imagination the half-hour we spent in this place? And then think how tantalizing it is to sit up in that stuffy room and talk to you across the table in the presence of that silly creature, Madame Grandin.”