Those words were engraved on the girl’s heart, and she said to herself every day:
“That lady will tell him that I love him, and when he comes here again I shall blush to meet him! I shan’t dare to look him in the face! Perhaps he won’t like it, but it’s his own fault; why did he tell me that he loved me? Ought a man to say such things if he doesn’t mean them? I made believe to laugh when I heard him, but in the bottom of my heart I realized how happy it made me! Of course he only meant to joke with me; he talked to me as he does to all the women he thinks pretty. He doesn’t know what misery he has caused me!”
On the site of the hovel occupied by the Calleux family, a pretty cottage had been built, consisting of a ground floor and attics only. Behind it was a garden of considerable size, surrounded by a fence. The cottage was constructed with the three thousand francs left by Dalville; it belonged to Coco, although he was still too young to live there. But Denise took pleasure in beautifying the little place for which the child was indebted to his benefactor; and there she passed a large part of every day, after performing her morning tasks, dreaming of him whose return she never ceased to expect. There, alone with the child, she talked to him about Auguste, taught him to love him, to remember that he owed everything to him, and never to enter the cottage without giving a thought to gratitude.
The garden was carefully tended. Denise planted flowers there. She remembered what she had seen in the lovely bourgeois gardens that she had visited, and she determined that the garden of the cottage should be laid out on the same plan. She desired that Auguste should be agreeably surprised when he visited the cottage, and should compliment her on her taste.
“He will see these shrubs,” she thought, “these beds of verdure; and he will be surprised that peasants should have done it all as well as people from Paris.”
But in another moment the girl would sigh and say to herself sadly:
“If he has gone to the end of the world, it will be a long time before he comes to see my garden.”
The winter was succeeded by the lovely days of spring, and Denise heard nothing from Virginie.
“She hasn’t found out anything about him,” thought the girl; “otherwise she would have come to tell me about it.”
The hope of hearing from Auguste induced Denise to make another trip to Paris. She easily obtained her aunt’s permission, and one morning she appeared at Auguste’s former abode.