'So you are not in love with her!' cried Larcher, with his most horribly cynical laugh. Then, with one of those generous impulses in which his better and truer nature revealed itself, he took his friend's hand and begged his pardon. Seeing in René's eyes that this was about to provoke a fresh outburst, he stopped him. 'Don't tell me anything. You'd only hate me for it afterwards. I'm not fit to listen to you to-day. I am enduring torture, and that makes me cruel.'
So it happened that even Suzanne's clumsy manœuvring turned out favourably for her plan of capture. The only man whose hostility she had to fear had voluntarily imposed silence upon himself. Since René was in absolute need of a confidante to receive the overflow of his feelings, it was to Emilie that he turned, and poor Emilie, out of sheer sisterly vanity, was already the abettor of the unknown lady whom she had seen through her brother's eyes encircled with a halo of aristocracy.
The very next morning after the soirée at Madame Komof's she had guessed from René's words that Madame Moraines was the only woman he had met there whom he really liked, and the only one, too, upon whom he had made any strong impression. Mothers and sisters possess some peculiar sense for perceiving these shades of feeling. For the next few days after making her discovery René's restlessness was very plain to Emilie. Bound to him by the double bond of affection and moral affinity, no feeling could traverse her brother's heart without finding an echo in her own. She knew that René was in love as well as if she had been present in the spirit during the two meetings in the Rue Murillo. She felt delighted, too, without being at all jealous, though her brother's attachment to Rosalie had caused her not only jealousy, but anxiety. With peculiarly feminine logic, she thought it but natural that the poet should enter upon an intrigue with a woman who was not free. She recognised that exceptional men require a mode of life and a standard of morality as exceptional as themselves, and she felt that this love of René's for a grand lady, whilst realising the proud dreams she had formed for her idol, would not rob her of a jot of affection.
His passion for Rosalie, on the contrary, she had regarded as an infringement upon her rights. This was because Rosalie resembled her, and was of her world, and because René's attachment to her could only result in marriage and the setting up of another home. It was therefore with secret joy that she beheld the birth of a fresh passion in her brother. She would have been glad if he had taken her further into his confidence, and so completed the confession he had made on awakening only a few hours after the soirée at Madame Komof's. But this he had not done, neither had she led him on to do so, her instinct telling her that René's confidences would only be the more complete for being spontaneous. So she waited, watching his eyes, whose every look she knew so well, for that expression of supreme joy which is the fever of happiness. Her silence was also to a great extent due to the fact that she only saw René when Fresneau was present. With that natural cowardice begotten of certain false positions, the poet left the house as soon as he was up and returned only in time for lunch. Then he again took himself off until dinner, going out immediately after, in order to avoid meeting Rosalie. The professor's abstraction was so great that he did not even notice this change in René's habits. Such, however, was not the case with Madame Offarel. Having come on two consecutive evenings with her two daughters and seen nothing of him whom she already looked upon as her son-in-law, she did not hesitate to remark upon his unwonted absence.
'Does Monsieur Larcher present Monsieur René to a fresh comtesse every evening that we never see him here now, nor at our house either?'
'It's true,' observed Fresneau, 'I never see him now. Where does he get to?'
'He has set to work again upon his "Savonarola,"' replied Emilie, 'and he spends his evenings at the Bibliothèque.'
Early on the morning after this conversation, which was also the morrow of René's second visit to Suzanne, Emilie entered her brother's room to give him a full account of what had been said. She found him getting out a few sheets of fine note-paper—some that she had bought for him—on which he was about to copy, in his best handwriting, the verses he was to read to Madame Moraines. The table was covered with sheet upon sheet of his poems, from which he had already made a selection.
When Emilie told him of her innocent fib he kissed her, and exclaimed, with a laugh, 'How clever you are!'
'There is nothing clever in it,' she replied; 'I am your sister, and I love you.' Then, taking up some of the papers scattered about, she asked, 'Do you really think of getting on with your book?'