All the time she was speaking Olivier was looking at her little patent leather shoes and the hem of her dress, which gave such a palpable lie to her statement. There was not a speck of dust upon them and her alleged walking companion's gaiters had very evidently not taken more than fifty steps. The married plotters surprised Olivier's look. It completed the Italian's confusion and almost provoked a wild fit of laughter in Corancez, who said merrily:—
"Are you going to Monte Carlo? I will perhaps meet you there. Where shall you dine?"
"I don't know," replied Olivier, with a forbidding tone that was almost rude.
He did not speak another word while the train fled along the coast, flying through tunnel after tunnel. The Southerner, without taking any notice of his old comrade's very apparent bad temper, entered into a conversation with Madame du Prat, which he managed to make almost a friendly one.
"So this is the first time you have been to the gaming-rooms, madame? In that case I shall ask you to let me play as you think best, in case we meet in the rooms.—Good, here is another tunnel.—Do you know what the Americans call this bit of the railway?—Has Miss Marsh not told you, Marchesa?—No?—Well, they call it 'the flute,' because there are only a few holes up above from time to time.—Isn't it pretty? How did you like Egypt, madame?—They say Alexandria is like Marseilles.—But the Marseillais would say they have no mistral.—Hautefeuille, you know my cocher, L'Ainé, as they call him?—About a couple of months ago at Cannes—one day when all the villas were rocking—he said to me: 'Do you like the South, Monsieur Marius?'—'Yes,' I replied, 'if it were not for the wind.' 'Hé, pécheire!' he cried, 'wind! Why, there is never any wind upon this coast, from Marseilles to Nice!' 'What is that?' I asked, pointing to one of the palms on the Croisette, which was so much bent upon one side that it was slipping into the sea. 'Do you call that the wind, Monsieur Marius?' he said; 'why, that is not wind—it is the mistral, which makes Provence so bright and cheerful!'"
"No, Corancez is the Italian's real lover," thought Olivier. He had only needed to see Hautefeuille with Andryana a couple of minutes to be quite convinced. She was certainly not the unknown mistress with whom the young man had passed part of the previous night.
The evident intimacy existing between her and the Southerner, their pleasure together, the too apparent falsehood she had told, the fascination Corancez's showiness had for her, as well as a host of indications, left no room for doubt.
"Yes," he repeated, "there is her lover.—They are worthy of each other. This beautiful, luxuriant woman, who might sell oranges on the Riva dei Schiavoni, is a fitting mate for this handsome chatterbox! Heavens! What an accurate observer he was who said:—'Will you be quiet a minute, Bouches-du-Rhône?'—Just look how complacently Hautefeuille listens to him! He does not seem at all astonished at these people vaunting their adultery in a train side by side with a young married couple. How he has changed!"
With all his scepticism, Olivier was still a slave to current illogical prejudices. While he was young it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to carry on his intrigues under the shelter of pure-minded women who might happen to be friends or relatives of his mistresses. And yet he was astonished that Pierre was not shocked at the idea of Madame Bonnacorsi and Corancez installing themselves comfortably in the same compartment as Monsieur and Madame du Prat! But the principal portion of his reflections had to do with the painful deductions that had been interrupted for a few hours. "No," he thought, "this plump Italian and this mountebank from the South cannot interest him.—If he tolerates them at all, it is because they are in his secret; they represent an easy-going complicity, or they are simply people who know his mistress.—For I am sure he has one. Even though I did not know that he had passed the night away from his room, even had I not seen him in bed this morning, with sunken eyes and pallid complexion, even had I not held in my hands his ring with its inscription, I should only have to look at him now.—He is another man!"
As he soliloquized in this way Olivier watched his friend intently, taking note of every movement with eager avidity, observing the very fluttering of his eyelids, of his respiration, as closely as a savage would note, analyze, and interpret the trampled grass, a footprint in the earth, a broken branch, a crumpled leaf upon the road taken by a fugitive.