"They go ahead--my grandchildren. Now I can understand how it is that, for the last few days, they have had faces as long as fiddles."

There was a short silence, and then Madame de Bracieux remarked, as though in conclusion:

"I know then, now, what your answer is to my poor old friend Clagny."

"How do you know, though?"

"Because if you will not have either of your cousins, who are, both of them, in their different ways, very taking, it is scarcely probable that you would accept an old friend of your grandmother's."

"But he, too, is very taking!"

"Yes, that's true; but he is sixty years old!"

"He does not look it!"

"He is though."

"I know; but that does not make any difference to the fact that I should not mind marrying him any more than I should Jean or Henry."

"You do not know what marriage is; you do not understand."

Bijou half closed her beautiful, bright eyes.

"Yes," she said, speaking slowly, "I do understand quite well, grandmamma."

"Well, all this is no answer for me to give to M. de Clagny."

"Is he coming to-day?"

"He is coming directly."

Bijou moved uneasily on her footstool, and then, after a moment's consideration, she said:

"You can tell him, grandmamma, that I am very much touched, and very much flattered that he should have thought of me, but that I do not want to marry yet--" And then, laying her head on the marchioness's lap, she added: "because I am too happy here with you."

"My little Bijou! my darling Bijou!" murmured Madame de Bracieux, stooping to kiss the pretty face lifted towards her, "you know what a comfort you are to me; but, all the same, you cannot stay for ever with your old grandmother. I am not saying that, though, in order to persuade you into a marriage that would be perfect folly."

Denyse looked up at the marchioness, as she asked:

"Folly? But why folly?"

"Because M. de Clagny is thirty-eight years older than you are, and he will be quite infirm just when you are in your prime; and such marriages have certain inconveniences which--well--which you would be the first to find out."

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:

"Here he is, grandmamma!"

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."

Bijou turned towards the marchioness.

"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 he is not going to the races?"

"No, he is busy packing."

"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 crepe 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 pa.s.s for her maid, and that's the most she could do. How is it, now?"

M. de Juzencourt laughed gruffly.

"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--"

As he was leaning towards him, and looking sentimental, Henry exclaimed impatiently, in his full, sonorous voice:

"Oh! hang my complexion!" and turning away, he left young La Balue planted there in the middle of the drawing-room, and went off himself to Jean de Blaye, who, with a melancholy expression on his face, was standing at some distance off, watching Bijou through the intricacies of a dance, for which six partners had all tried to claim her.

When M. de Clagny approached Denyse, and bowed to her ceremoniously, she said at once, without even returning his bow: