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Lescande, however, whose memory seemed better, felt his heart leap with joy at the majestic appearance of the young cavalier who approached him. He made a movement to rush forward; a smile covered his good-natured face, but it ended in a grimace. Evidently he had been forgotten.
Madame Lescande, who had listened, motionless, and pale as marble, remained in the same lifeless attitude, her eyes fixed, her hands clenched yearning from the depths of her heart that death would summon her. Suddenly a singular noise, seeming to come from the next room, struck her ear. It was only a convulsive sob, or violent and smothered laughter.
At the instant she observed Camors whom the interest of the moment had withdrawn from his concealment gave a startled cry, gathered up her skirts, and retired within the room. Since leaving college up to this hour, Louis de Camors had never formed any great opinion of the Juliet who had taken Lescande as her Romeo.
But in all these interviews he held toward Madame Lescande the language and manner of a brother: perhaps because he secretly persisted in his delicate resolve; perhaps because he was not ignorant that every road leads to Rome and one as surely as another.
"She is there, my dear friend," answered Lescande, in a low voice and he pointed to the closed shutters of a large window of a balcony surmounting the veranda. "She is there; and this is our son." Camors let his hand pass listlessly over the child's hair. "The deuce!" he said; "but you have not wasted time. And you are happy, my good fellow?"
Camors, now not more than a couple of feet from him, was passing on, and his handsome countenance gave not the slightest sign of emotion. Suddenly, without changing a single line of his face, he drew rein, took the cigar from his lips, and said, in a tranquil voice: "Hello! You have no longer a wolf head!" "Ha! Then you know me?" cried Lescande. "Know you? Why not?"
Lescande entered, and his first act dissipated the apprehension his conduct had caused. He rushed to the young Count and seized him by both hands, while Camors remarked that his face was troubled and his lips trembled. "Sit down and be calm," he said. "My friend," said the other, after a pause, "I come late to see you, for which I crave pardon; but I am myself so miserable! See, I am in mourning!"
Eight days after his father's death, he was reclining on the lounge in his smoking-room, his face dark as night and as his thoughts, when a servant entered and handed him a card. He took it listlessly, and read "Lescande, architect." Two red spots rose to his pale cheeks "I do not see any one," he said.
Toward the close of his college course, he became particularly attached to a poor bursar, by name Lescande, who excelled in mathematics, but who was very ungraceful, awkwardly shy and timid, with a painful sensitiveness to the peculiarities of his person.
Madame Lescande reassured herself more and more; and feeling it unnecessary to be on her guard, as at first, thought she might permit herself a little levity. No woman is flattered at being loved only as a sister. Camors, a little disquieted by the course things were taking, made some slight effort to divert it.
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