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Giselle brought up frequently the subject of heredity: she named no one, but Fred could see that she had a secret terror lest Enguerrand, who in person was very like his father, might also inherit his character. Fears on this subject, however, appeared unfounded. There was nothing about the child that was not good; his tastes were those of his mother.
Giselle was a model woman in everything, in tact, in goodness, in good sense, and she was very attentive to the poor old mother of Fred, who but for her must have died long ago of loneliness and sorrow.
"McKay, you've lost," he cried. "I'm the winner!" In the same moment he took the girl's hand and drew her from behind his chair. "Giselle, do as you said you were going to do. Prove to him that I've won." Slowly she came to Jolly Roger. Her cheeks were like the red of the sunset. Her eyes were flaming. Her lips were parted. And dumbly he waited, and wondered, until she stood close to him.
While this platonic attachment grew stronger and stronger between Fred and Giselle, assisted by the innocent complicity of little Enguerrand, Jacqueline was discovering how hard it is for a girl of good birth, if she is poor, to carry out her plans of honest independence.
"Heavens! but you could tell your mother!" "You forget, I have no mother," replied Jacqueline in a tone which frightened her friend: "I had a dear mamma once, but she would enter less than any one into my sorrows; and as to my father it would make things worse to speak to him," she added, clasping her hands. "Have you ever read any novels, Giselle?"
As they crossed the Parc Monceau to reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead, that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity of smirching the character and the reputation of her neighbors.
She was obliged to give him the tips of her fingers, as she said in her turn, with audacity equal to his own: "Oh, it was less than nothing. Only, Giselle, I told your husband that I had had some bad news, and shall have to go back to Paris, and he tried to persuade me not to go." "I beg you not to go," said Oscar, vehemently. "Bad news?" repeated Giselle, "you did not say a word to me about it!"
And could you do it?" said Giselle, whose knowledge of history was limited to what may be found in school abridgments. It was therefore a great satisfaction to her when Fred declared that he never should have known how to set about it.
She would be the lady who presided over his life, for whose sake all good deeds and generous actions would be done, the idol, higher than a wife or any object of earthly passion, the White Angel whom poets have sung. Giselle pretended that she did not understand him, but she was divinely happy. This, then, was the reward of her spotless life!
"A matchmaker already!" said the Baroness, with a smile. "And so soon after you have found out what it costs to be a mother! How good of you, my dear Giselle! So you support Fred as a candidate? But I can't say I think he has much chance; Monsieur de Nailles has his own ideas." She spoke as if she really thought that M. de Nailles could have any ideas but her own.
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