The dinner seemed both to her and to him interminable; she was quite silent through it, and ate nothing. She was conscious of a sullen gaze which her cousin, de Vannes, fastened on her, and which made her feel that, by him, she was unforgiven. She was confused by the florid speech made to her by the Baron Friederich, who was so enchanted by her that he put no measure to his audible admiration. Othmar, seated beside her, said very little. The party was gay, and the conversation animated. The silence of each of them passed unnoticed. The Duchesse, who alone remarked it, said to Raymond de Prangins:
‘It is their way of being in love; it is the old way, which they have copied out of Lamartine and Bernardin de St. Pierre. It is infinitely droll that Othmar should play the sentimental lover, but he does. I want Nadine Napraxine to see him like that. I asked her to dinner, but they had a dinner party at home. She sent me a little line just now, promising, if her people were gone, to come for an hour in the evening. The child looks well, does she not? What jewels he has given her! They are bigger than mine. It is the least he can do; the Finance is bound to buy big jewels. Who would ever have supposed he would have seen anything in that baby, that convent mouse? To be sure, she is handsome. Such a marriage for that little mouse to make! a mere baby like that, a child proud of being the médaillon of her convent yesterday! After all, nothing takes some men like that air of innocence, which bores them to death as soon as they have put an end to it. It is like dew; it is like drinking milk in the meadow in the morning; we don’t care for the milk, but the doctors say it is good for us, and so——I wonder what she is thinking about. About her gowns, I dare say, or about her jewels. She is just like a vignette out of “Paul et Virginie.” She need not pretend to be in love with him; no one will believe in it; he will not believe in it himself; he is too rich. What can he have seen in her more than in five thousand other fillettes he might have married? To be sure she is handsome. She will be handsomer——’
She put up her eyeglass and looked down the table at her young cousin with amusement and envy, mingled as they mingled in little Blanchette. The amusement was at the girl’s evident embarrassment, the envy was of her youth, of her complexion, of her form, of all which told her own unerring instincts that Yseulte in a few years, even in a few months, would be one of the most beautiful women of her world.
And she said angrily to de Prangins, ‘Some men like children; it is as boys like green apples.’
‘At least the green apples are not painted,’ thought the young man as he murmured aloud a vague compliment. Raymond de Prangins, like most men of his age, had never looked twice at a fillette; he had been three weeks in the same house with this child and had never addressed a word to her or noticed whether her eyes were black or brown; but now that she had become the betrothed wife of Othmar, the charm of the forbidden fruit had come to her; she had suddenly become an object of interest in his sight; he was never tired of finding out her beauties, he was absorbed in studying the shape of her throat, the colour of her hair, the whiteness of her shoulders, which came so timidly and with a little shiver, like shorn lambs, out of the first low bodice that she had ever worn. To know that she was about to belong to another man, gave her all at once importance, enchantment, and desirability in his sight.
CHAPTER XXI.
Immediately that the dinner was over Othmar made his excuses and left Millo to take the night express to Paris. When once she knew that he was absent, she lost all fear.
Her innocent love was at that stage when the presence of a lover is full of trouble and alarm, and the happiest hours are those in which his absence permits its dreams to wander about her memory undisturbed. When he was there he was still, to her, a stranger whose gaze embarrassed her, whose touch confused her, whose association with herself was unfamiliar and unreal; but, away from him, there was nothing to check or dismay those spiritual and poetic fancies which had lodged their ideal in him. No one of those around her would ever have imagined that she had these fancies, or would have understood them in the slightest degree; they only thought that she was very naturally enraptured to be chosen by a very rich man, and did not doubt that in her mind she was musing, as Blanchette had suggested, on the colour of her liveries, the number of her horses, the places of her residence, and the prospect of her jewels.