The picture was so pretty that the countess stopped short and pointed it out to Blondet and the abbe; for they could see Madame Michaud from where they stood, without her seeing them.
“I always come this way when I walk in the park,” said the countess, softly. “I delight in looking at the pavilion and its two turtle-doves, as much as I delight in a fine view.”
She leaned significantly on Blondet’s arm, as if to make him share sentiments too delicate for words but which all women feel.
“I wish I were a gate-keeper at Les Aigues,” said Blondet, smiling. “Why! what troubles you?” he added, noticing an expression of sadness on the countess’s face.
Women are always hiding some important thought when they say, hypocritically, “It is nothing.”
“A woman may be the victim of ideas which would seem very flimsy to you,” she added, “but which, to us, are terrible. As for me, I envy Olympe’s lot.”
“God hears you,” said the abbe, smiling as though to soften the sternness of his remark.
Madame de Montcornet grew seriously uneasy when she noticed an expression of fear and anxiety in Olympe’s face and attitude. By the way a woman draws out her needle or sets her stitches another woman understands her thoughts. In fact, though wearing a rose-colored dress, with her hair carefully braided about her head, the bailiff’s wife was thinking of matters that were out of keeping with her pretty dress, the glorious day, and the work her hands were engaged on. Her beautiful brow, and the glance she turned sometimes on the ground at her feet, sometimes on the foliage around, evidently seeing nothing, betrayed some deep anxiety,--all the more unconsciously because she supposed herself alone.
“Just as I was envying her! What can have saddened her?” whispered the countess to the abbe.
“Madame,” he replied in the same tone, “tell me why man is often seized with vague and unaccountable presentiments of evil in the very midst of some perfect happiness?”
“Abbe!” said Blondet, smiling, “you talk like a bishop. Napoleon said, ‘Nothing is stolen, all is bought!’”
“Such a maxim, uttered by those imperial lips, takes the proportions of society itself,” replied the priest.
“Well, Olympe, my dear girl, what is the matter?” said the countess going up to her former maid. “You seem sad and thoughtful; is it a lover’s quarrel?”