Helen slowly advanced to the easy chair in which Armand was sitting; with a pretty gesture she took the cigarette and threw it into the fire, then knelt before the young man, encircled his head with her arms, and, seeking his lips, kissed him; it looked as though she wished to destroy immediately the painful impression which her husband's attitude might have left on the man she loved, and in a clear tone of voice, the liveliness of which discovered a free expansiveness after a lengthened constraint, she said:
"How do you do, Armand. Are you in love with me to-day?"
"And yourself," he questioned, "are you in love with me?"
He was caressing the hand of the young woman who had thrown herself upon the ground, and with her head resting on her lover's knees, was looking at him in a fever of ecstasy.
"Ah! you flirt," she returned, "I have no need to tell you so to have you believe it."
"No," he replied, "I know that you love me—much—though not enough to go all lengths with the feeling."
The tone in which he uttered this sentence was marked with an irony which made it palpably an epigram. It was an allusion to oft-stated complaints. Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the smile of a woman who has her answer ready.
"So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot believe in my feelings without this last proof?"
"Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. It is true," he went on with a more gloomy air, "so long as you refuse to be entirely mine I shall suspect—not your sincerity, for I think that you think you love me, but the truth of this love. Too often people imagine that they have feelings which they have not. Ah! if you loved me, as you say, and as you think, would you deny me yourself as you do? Would you refuse me the meeting that I have asked of you more than twenty times? Why you would grant it as much for your own sake as for mine."
"Armand—" she began thus, then stopped, blushing.