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To M. de Sautron, who had never seen him other than self-contained, supercilious, and mocking, this was an amazing revelation. He shrank from it almost; it gave him the feeling of prying, of peeping through a keyhole. He slapped his friend's shoulder. "My dear Gervais, here is a magnificently romantic mood. Enough said. Keep to it, and I promise you that all will presently be well.
"Of your last. This Binet girl." "That! Pooh! An incident; hardly a folly." "A folly at such a time," Sautron insisted. The Marquis looked a question. The Count answered it. "Aline," said he, pregnantly. "She knows. How she knows I can't tell you, but she knows, and she is deeply offended." The smile perished on the Marquis' face. He gathered himself up.
That at least was the point of view of Mme. de Sautron. "Tell me, madame," quoth Aline, "are all men beasts?" Unlike her brother, Madame la Comtesse was tall and majestically built. In the days before her marriage with M. de Sautron, ill-natured folk described her as the only man in the family. She looked down now from her noble height upon her little niece with startled eyes.
As it is " he shrugged "why, twenty-four hours of her have been enough for me as they would have been for any man a mercenary, self-seeking little baggage with the soul of a trull. Bah!" He shuddered in disgust of himself and her. "Ah! That makes it easier for you," said M. de Sautron, cynically. "Don't say it, Charles. It is not so. Had you been less of a fool, you would have warned me sooner."
Leaving his host to act as his plenipotentiary with Mademoiselle de Kercadiou, and to explain to her that it was his profound contrition that compelled him to depart without taking formal leave of her, the Marquis rolled away from Sautron in a cloud of gloom. Twenty-four hours with La Binet had been more than enough for a man of his fastidious and discerning taste.
You are just vile both of you." And he went out. Mlle. de Kercadiou walked with her aunt in the bright morning sunshine of a Sunday in March on the broad terrace of the Chateau de Sautron.
But that ill-timed riot had robbed him at once of both. Faithful to his word to Sautron he had definitely broken with La Binet, only to find that Aline had definitely broken with him. And by the time that he had sufficiently recovered from his grief to think again of La Binet, the comedienne had vanished beyond discovery. For all this he blamed, and most bitterly blamed, Andre-Louis.
Such was her vehemence and obvious determination that Mme. de Sautron fetched herself out of her despair to attempt persuasion. Aline was her niece, and such a marriage in the family would be to the credit of the whole of it. At all costs nothing must frustrate it. "Listen, my dear," she said. "Let us reason. M. le Marquis is away and will not be back until to-morrow." "True.
"Wherever did you learn that dreadful, that so improper word?" And then Mme. de Sautron did violence to her feelings. She realized that here great calm and prudence were required. "My child, since you know so much that you ought not to know, there can be no harm in my adding that a gentleman must have these little distractions." "But why, madame? Why is it so?"
I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them." Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the Chateau de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father's gloomy forebodings. But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all.
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