Bijou had risen from her low seat on hearing the sound of carriage-wheels, which drew up in front of the hall-door. She looked through the window, and then ran away, saying:
During luncheon, Madame de Bracieux announced, in a careless, indifferent way:
"M. de Clagny is leaving here; he came to say good-bye to me this morning."
Bijou looked up, and Jean de Blaye remarked:
"He is leaving here? Why, it seemed as though he had taken root in this part of the world."
"Oh," put in M. de Rueille, "old Clagny's roots are never very deep."
"When is he leaving, grandmamma?" she asked anxiously.
"Why, at once; to-morrow, I think. Anyhow, we shall see him to-night at Tourville; he is going to the ball in order to see everyone to whom he wants to say good-bye."
"And our play to-morrow!" exclaimed Denyse, in consternation. "He had promised me over and over again to come to it."
The marchioness glanced at her grand-daughter, and said to herself that, decidedly, even with the kindest heart in the world, youth knows no pity.
Bijou's arrival at the Tourville ball was a veritable triumph. In her pink crêpe dress, which matched her complexion admirably, she looked wonderfully pretty, and different from anyone else.
"Just look at the Dubuisson girl," said Louis de la Balue to M. de Juzencourt. "She has tried to get herself up like Mademoiselle de Courtaix. She has copied her dress exactly, and just see what she looks like. She might pass for her maid, and that's the most she could do. How is it, now?"
"Why, it's just that if the outside is the same, what's inside it isn't the same. Isn't she going to be married?"
"Yes, she's going to marry a young Huguenot, who must be somewhere about, hiding in some corner or another. Ah! No! he isn't in a corner either. There he is, like all the others, fluttering round 'The Bijou.'"
"And you? You don't flutter round her?" asked M. de Juzencourt.
"I? I'd marry her--because, sooner or later, one's got to get married, or one's parents make a fuss, because of keeping up the name, you know--but as to fluttering round--By Jove, no! that isn't in my line!" and then, in a languid way, he went off to Henry de Bracieux.
"How hot it is," he began, glancing at him dreamily, and speaking in a low voice, with an affected drawl. "You are lucky not to turn red. You've got such a complexion, though, that's true. You look like a regular Hercules, and yet, with that, your complexion is as delicate--"