For an instant she hesitates, then shyly touches his temple with her soft warm lips.
"One upon your gray hair," she murmurs.
They suddenly hear an approaching footstep. Rohritz starts to his feet, but it is only his brother, who says, as he advances towards them,--
"Where the deuce are you hiding, Edgar? My wife is frantic with impatience."
"Thérèse must be merciful," Edgar replies, with a smile. "When for once one finds the flower of happiness in his pathway, one cannot say, 'I have no time to pluck you; my sister-in-law is waiting for me.'"
"Aha!" Edmund exclaims, with a low bow. "Hm! Thérèse will be vexed because I was right, and not she; but I rejoice with all my heart, not because I was right, but because I could wish you no better fortune in this world."
Stella's betrothal to Edgar is now a week old. Thérèse was vexed at first at her own want of penetration, but it was an irritation soon soothed. She is absorbed in providing the most exquisite trousseau that money and taste combined can procure in Paris.
Zino, too, was vexed, first that Stella should have been subjected to annoyance on his account, and in the second place because his temporary lameness prevented his challenging de Hauterive. "It was tragic enough not to be able to dance the cotillon with our star, but not to be able to fight for the star is intolerable."
Thus Capito declares in a long congratulatory epistle to Edgar, adding, in a postscript, "The ladies in whose honour certain pictures were turned, as you lately observed, with their faces to the wall, were the Lipinskis, mother and daughter. I am betrothed to Natalie."