Beatrix walked on pensively, in silence. Camille endured unspeakable martyrdom, and she cast a sidelong look at her companion which looked like flame.
“Ah, my dear; but _you_ are happy,” said Beatrix presently, laying her hand on Camille’s arm like a woman wearied out with some inward struggle.
“Yes, happy indeed!” replied Felicite, with savage bitterness.
The two women dropped upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion. No creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more Machiavellian penetration than the marquise throughout this week.
“Yes, you are happy, but I!” she said,--“to know of Conti’s infidelities, and have to bear them!”
“Why not leave him?” said Camille, seeing the hour had come to strike a decisive blow.
Both were gazing into a clump of trees with a stupefied air.
“I will go and hasten breakfast; my walk has given me an appetite,” she said.
“Our conversation has taken away mine,” remarked Beatrix.
The marquise in her morning dress was outlined in white against the dark greens of the foliage. Calyste, who had slipped through the salon into the garden, took a path, along which he sauntered as though he were meeting her by accident. Beatrix could not restrain a quiver as he approached her.
“Madame, in what way did I displease you yesterday?” he said, after the first commonplace sentences had been exchanged.
“But you have neither pleased me nor displeased me,” she said, in a gentle voice.
The tone, air, and manner in which the marquise said these words encouraged Calyste.
“Am I so indifferent to you?” he said in a troubled voice, as the tears came into his eyes.
“Ought we not to be indifferent to each other?” replied the marquise. “Have we not, each of us, another, and a binding attachment?”
“Oh!” cried Calyste, “if you mean Camille, I did love her, but I love her no longer.”
“Then why are you shut up together every morning?” she said, with a treacherous smile. “I don’t suppose that Camille, in spite of her passion for tobacco, prefers her cigar to you, or that you, in your admiration for female authors, spend four hours a day in reading their romances.”
“So then you know--” began the guileless young Breton, his face glowing with the happiness of being face to face with his idol.