It was a portion of Sophie’s self-imposed punishment that she should never go fully into a church, halting, as Paul Verney had noticed, just within the door, and, like the publican, not daring so much as to lift her eyes to the altar, but calling herself a sinner and feeling herself to be the greatest sinner on earth. Another part of her punishment was the separation from Lucie, the little half-sister whom she had attended from the hour of her birth with a mother’s care, and toward whom she had taken a mother’s place. But she made no complaint of this, nor of anything else; and when Lucie, by her own ingenuity, had contrived to come back to her, it brought a gleam of joy into Sophie’s life such as she had never expected to feel again.
Madame Bernard remained unforgiving. As Lucie had truly said, although as stern and uncompromising in looks as the monument in the public square at Bienville and old Marie who sat on the bench and knitted sternly, Madame Bernard was, at heart, a greater coward about people than little Toni. She knew if she once saw Sophie everything would be forgiven, and so she avoided seeing her, and dared not even write to her. Little Lucie had had no real difficulty in accomplishing her object of seeing Sophie by the means she had retailed to Paul, and otherwise wrapped the stately Madame Bernard around her little finger.
Lucie, who was accustomed to luxury, adapted herself with ingenuous perversity to the plain way of living of the Ravenels. She even learned to make omelettes herself, and with her little lace-trimmed gown tucked up around her waist, to the horror of Harper, the nursery governess, actually learned to broil a chop as well as Sophie could.
Lucie was a child of many passions. Her attachment to Sophie was one of the strongest, and Sophie alone, of everybody on earth, could bend Lucie to her will,—that is, as long as they were together, for, childlike, Lucie forgot all the gentle commands and recommendations laid upon her by Sophie when they separated, and remembered few of the admirable things which Sophie asked her to do. But she loved Sophie with a determined constancy that none of Madame Bernard’s blandishments nor all the bonbons in Paris could change.
CHAPTER IV
At the hour when Colonel Duquesne and the two officers were discussing Creci’s insult to Sophie—for insult they all well knew it to be—Sophie and Ravenel were sitting on their balcony after their supper, and Lucie had been put to bed. Sophie had not spoken to Ravenel of what had happened in the park since their agitated walk home, but now she said timidly, placing her hand in his, in the soft purple twilight which enveloped them, and through which the lights of the town twinkled beneath them:
“What do you think that man Creci will do?”
“Prefer charges against me, I suppose,” returned Ravenel, “but if he does, I think he will get the worst of it. No one could believe that you, Sophie, could give any encouragement to a man like that. Your life here has been too prudent. No other woman, I believe, could have lived with the beauty and natural gaiety that you possess, effacing herself so completely, and all for me. What an evil hour for you, dearest, that ever we met!”