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A few evenings after the one on which Sallenauve and Marie-Gaston had taken Jacques Bricheteau to Saint-Sulpice to hear the Signora Luigia's voice, the church was the scene of a curious little incident that passed by almost wholly unperceived. A young man entered hastily by a side-door; he seemed agitated, and so absorbed in some anxiety that he forgot to remove his hat.
Beneath it was written "Plan for a mausoleum to be erected to the memory of Madame Marie-Gaston, nee Chaulieu, by her husband; from the designs of Charles Dorlange, sculptor, 42 rue de l'Ouest."
Before leaving France, Marie-Gaston had requested Monsieur de l'Estorade to take charge of his affairs, and later he sent him a power-of-attorney to enable him to do so properly. Some weeks ago his grief, still living and active, suggested to him a singular idea. In the midst of the beautiful park at Ville d'Avray is a little lake, with an island upon it which Louise dearly loved.
All this unexpectedness so upset me that I felt unfitted to intervene on behalf of Monsieur Marie-Gaston, and I should, I believe, have pleaded his cause very ill if Monsieur Dorlange had not stopped me at the first words I said about it. "I know, madame," he said, "all that you can possibly tell me about my unfaithful friend. I do not forgive, but I forget my wrong.
When he had finished his tale he asked if I did not think it a victorious answer to the ridiculous fears of our friend. "Modesty," I replied, "obliges me to share your security; but they say that in the army shots frequently ricochet and kill their victims." "Then you think me capable of the impertinence Marie-Gaston is good enough to suspect in me?"
One thing reassured the new deputy, and enabled him to come to Paris for, at any rate, a few hours. A friend of Marie-Gaston, an English nobleman with whom he had been intimate in Florence, came out to see him, and the sad man greeted the new-comer with apparent joy.
The extreme beauty of the Niobe atoned for all the rest and the defamer of mothers saw his work crowned, in spite of an admonition given to him by the venerable secretary on the day of the distribution of the prizes. But, poor fellow! I excuse him, for I now learn that he never knew his mother. It was Dorlange, the poor abandoned child at Tours, the friend of Marie-Gaston.
"Thoroughly, monsieur; and I repeat that the property left to Marie-Gaston by the will of his wife is so little desired by him that, to my knowledge, he is about to spend a sum of two or three hundred thousand francs in building a mausoleum for a wife whom he has never ceased to mourn."
Anxious also to return to Marie-Gaston, he resolved to profit by the general stir created by the minister's arrival to slip away; and by a masterly manoeuvre he made his way slyly to the door of the salon, expecting to escape without being seen. But he reckoned without Nais, to whom he was engaged for a quadrille.
"And your history refutes this fear in the mind of Monsieur Marie-Gaston?" "You shall judge."
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