"How happy you must be! I haven't seen anything; but I hear everybody say that it is so beautiful."
"Happy above all things to find you again, little Aline. It is such a long time--"
"I should say as much, you bad girl. Whose fault is it?"
In the saddest recess of her memory Felicia found the date of the rupture between them, coincident in her mind with another date when her youth died in a never-to-be-forgotten scene.
"What have you been doing all this time, my love?"
"Oh! always the same thing--nothing worth talking about."
"Yes, yes, we know what you call doing nothing, little brave heart. It is giving your life to others, is it not?"
But Aline was no longer listening. She was smiling affectionately at a point straight before her, and Felicia, turning to see to whom that smile was addressed, saw Paul de Géry replying to Mademoiselle Joyeuse's shy and blushing salutation.
"Do I know Monsieur Paul! I should think so. We talk of you often enough. Has he never told you?"
She stopped abruptly as a light flashed through her mind; and, paying no heed to de Géry, who came forward to do homage to her triumph, she leaned hastily toward Aline and whispered to her. The other blushed, protested with smiles, with inaudible words: "How can you imagine such a thing? At my age. A grandmamma!" And at last she grasped her father's arm to escape that friendly raillery.
When Felicia saw the two young people walk away side by side, when she realized--what they themselves did not yet know--that they loved each other, she felt as if everything about her were crumbling. And when her dream lay at her feet, in a thousand fragments, she began to stamp upon it in a rage. After all, he was quite right to prefer that little Aline to her. Would a respectable man ever dare to marry Mademoiselle Ruys? She with a home of her own, a family, nonsense! You are a strumpet's daughter, my dear; you must be a strumpet yourself, if you wish to be anything.
The day was drawing near its close. The crowd, moving more rapidly than before, with gaps here and there, was beginning to stream toward the exit, after eddying violently around the success of the year, surfeited, a little weary, but still excited by the artistic electricity with which the atmosphere was charged. A great ray of sunlight, the sunlight of four o'clock in the afternoon, illuminated the rosework of the windows, cast upon the gravelled paths rainbow-like beams that crept gently up the bronze or marble of the statues, suffusing a lovely nude body with bright colors and giving to the vast museum something of the aspect of a garden. Felicia, absorbed in her profound, melancholy reverie, did not see the man who came toward her, superb, refined, fascinating, through the throng of visitors, who respectfully opened a passage for him, while the name of "Mora" was whispered on every side.