He was approaching; the semicircle was almost travelled round; he came to the last pupil; he turned. But Madame was before me; she had stepped out suddenly; she seemed to magnify her proportions and amplify her drapery; she eclipsed me; I was hid. She knew my weakness and deficiency; she could calculate the degree of moral paralysis, the total default of self-assertion, with which, in a crisis, I could be struck. She hastened to her kinsman, she broke upon him volubly, she mastered his attention, she hurried him to the door--the glass door opening on the garden. I think he looked round. Could I but have caught his eye, courage, I think, would have rushed in to aid feeling, and there would have been a charge, and, perhaps, a rescue; but already the room was all confusion, the semicircle broken into groups, my figure was lost among thirty more conspicuous. Madame had her will. Yes, she got him away, and he had not seen me. He thought me absent. Five o'clock struck, the loud dismissal bell rang, the school separated, the room emptied.
There seems, to my memory, an entire darkness and distraction in some certain minutes I then passed alone--a grief inexpressible over a loss unendurable. _What_ should I do--oh! _what_ should I do--when all my life's hope was thus torn by the roots out of my riven, outraged heart?
What I _should_ have done I know not, when a little child--the least child in the school--broke with its simplicity and its unconsciousness into the raging yet silent centre of that inward conflict.
'Mademoiselle,' lisped the treble voice, 'I am to give you that. M. Paul said I was to seek you all over the house, from the _grenier_ to the cellar, and when I found you to give you that.'
And the child delivered a note. The little dove dropped on my knee, its olive leaf plucked off. I found neither address nor name, only these words,--
'It was not my intention to take leave of you when I said good-bye to the rest, but I hoped to see you in _classe_. I was disappointed. The interview is deferred. Be ready for me. Ere I sail, I must see you at leisure, and speak with you at length. Be ready. My moments are numbered, and, just now, monopolized; besides, I have a private business on hand which I will not share with any, nor communicate, even to you.--Paul.'