She veiled herself with indifference lightly embroidered with irony and, believing herself sheltered from a too inquisitive glance, ingenuously replied:
"It is really but three years since I was twenty-seven. It is now the thirtieth year, or almost."
He looked at her from head to foot, but without insolence.
"What frankness! But you have no need to lie." His eyes returned to her figure, which was a little full, he thought.
"Yes, esthetic, isn't it?" hazarded Sixtine, negligently lifting her arms to fasten some pin to her coiffure.
The gesture was fine and instrumental in making her bust more delicate in line.
"Esthetic? Oh, no! It seems good and with no treacheries."
A smile, quickly banished, attested the woman's contentment and was the most feminine efflorescence of the old human perversities. In a slow, undeceived voice, she said:
"See," Hubert returned, "you breathe on my bubbles and my sole and last chance of illusion vanishes, for in placing my desires in the past, I secretly constructed a bridge spanning the present. Ah! Madame, what transcendental cruelty!"
She was conscious of having taken a wretched crossroad, and of having become bemired there.
The shadow diffused itself in swift waves. Slightly nervous, Sixtine walked towards the light of a nearby glade, at the foot of the avenue. There, the oaks and beeches, whose foliage was already brightened by the setting sun, were grouped in a narrow grove. The wind passed, stirring the dry leaves. A low and heavy branch bent down with the sound of a rustling of stuffs. Like a drop of rain, a leaf, then many leaves, descended with a slow moaning sound.
"They follow me! They pursue me!" she cried, caught in the vortex she vainly fled.
And swept away, like a leaf in the circular flight of wind, she drew near Entragues, distracted, panting, crying all the time:
"The leaves pursue me, the dead leaves pursue me!"
"What is the matter," Hubert asked, surprised by such a strange crisis.
While, still frantic and trembling, she seized his arm and leaned against it, he coldly added:
"Have you ever committed a crime in your life?"
This ironic interrogation changed the nature of the fever, like scalding water on a stone.
"Then you become altogether interesting."