"You are mistaken," said Madame Oberlé. "I suffer cruelly on account of this arrangement, but I shall make no scandal which will nullify what you have decided upon."
"Then," said M. Oberlé, "you have the chance to prove your words. I was not going to ask you to do anything, and I had decided to take Lucienne to Strasburg to the house of a third person, who would have let them meet in her drawing-room."
"Will you then agree to accompany your daughter?"
She thought for a moment, shut her eyes, and said:
There was a look of surprise in her husband's eyes, and in Jean's, and also in Lucienne's.
"I shall be delighted; for my arrangement did not quite suit my fancy. It is more natural that you should take your daughter. But what rendezvous do you intend to choose?"
A movement of stupefaction made the father and son both straighten themselves. The house at Obernai? The home of the Biehlers? The son at least understood the sacrifice which the mother was making, and he rose and kissed her tenderly.
"That is right, Monica--very right. And when will it be convenient to you?"
"Just the time to let M. de Farnow know about it. You will fix the day and the hour--write to him when he answers you."
Lucienne, in spite of her want of tenderness, drew closer to her mother that evening. In the little drawing-room, where she worked at crochet for two hours, she sat near Madame Oberlé, and with her watchful eyes she followed, or tried to follow, the thoughts on the lined face so mobile and still so expressive. But often one can only partly read what is passing in a mind. Neither Lucienne nor Jean guessed the reason which had so quickly prompted Madame Oberlé's act of self-sacrifice.
Ten days later, Lucienne and her mother had just entered the family house where Madame Oberlé had spent all her childhood, the home of the Biehlers, which lifted its three stories of windows with little green panes, and its fortified gable above the ramparts of Obernai, between two houses of the sixteenth century--just like it.
Madame Oberlé had gone upstairs, saying to the caretaker:
"You will receive a gentleman presently who will ask for me."
In the large room on the first floor which she entered, one of the few rooms which were still furnished, she had seen her parents live and die; the walnut-wood bed, the brown porcelain stove, the chairs covered with woollen velvet which repeated on every seat and every back the same basket of flowers, the crucifix framed under raised glass, the two views of Italy brought back from a journey in 1837, all remained in the same places and in the same order as in the old days. Instinctively in crossing the threshold she sought the holy water stoup hanging near the lintel, where the old people, when they went into the room, moistened their fingers as on the threshold of a holy abode.