“I have again vexed you, Contessina, and you are looking at me with the glance of our hours of dispute. You will later regret having been unkind to-day.”
As he pronounced those enigmatical words, she saw that he had in his eyes and in his smile something different and indefinable. It must have been that she loved him still more than she herself believed as for a second she forgot both her pain and her resolution, and she asked him, quickly:
“You have some trouble? You are suffering? What is it?”
“Nothing,” replied Dorsenne. “But time is flying, the minutes are going by, and not only the minutes. There is an old and charming. French ode, which you do not know and which begins:
‘Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, Madame.
Las, le temps? Non. Mais nous nous en allons.’”
“Which means, little Countess, in simple prose, that this is no doubt the last conversation we shall have together this season, and that it would be cruel to mar for me this last visit.”
“Do I understand you aright?” said Alba. She, too, knew too well Julien’s way of speaking not to know that that mannerism, half-mocking, half-sentimental, always served him to prepare phrases more grave, and against the emotion of which her fear of appearing a dupe rose in advance. She crossed her arms upon her breast, and after a pause she continued, in a grave voice: “You are going away?”
“Yes,” he replied, and from his coat-pocket he partly drew his ticket. “You see I have acted like the poltroons who cast themselves into the water. My ticket is bought, and I shall no longer hold that little discourse which I have held for months, that, ‘Sir executioner, one moment.... Du Barry’.”
“You are going away?” repeated the young girl, who did not seem to have heeded the jest by which Julien had concealed his own confusion at the effect of his so abruptly announced departure. “I shall not see you any more!... And if I ask you not to go yet? You have spoken to me of our friendship.... If I pray you, if I beseech you, in the name of that friendship, not to deprive me of it at this instant, when I have no one, when I am so alone, so horribly alone, will you answer no? You have often told me that you were my friend, my true friend? If it be true, you will not go. I repeat, I am alone, and I am afraid.”
“Come, little Countess,” replied Dorsenne, who began to be terrified by the young girl’s sudden excitement, “it is not reasonable to agitate yourself thus, because yesterday you had a very sad conversation with Fanny Hafner! First, it is altogether impossible for me to defer my departure. You force me to give you coarse, almost commercial reasons. But my book is about to appear, and I must be there for the launching of the sale, of which I have already told you. And then you are going away, too. You will have all the diversions of the country, of your Venetian friends and charming Lydia Maitland!”