"Why, really, mother--"

Mme. d'Aiglemont summoned up all her strength. "Moina," she said, "you
must attend carefully to this that I ought to tell you--"

"I am attending," returned the Countess, folding her arms, and affecting
insolent submission. "Permit me, mother, to ring for Pauline," she added
with incredible self-possession; "I will send her away first."

She rang the bell.

"My dear child, Pauline cannot possibly hear--"

"Mamma," interrupted the Countess, with a gravity which must have struck
her mother as something unusual, "I must--"

She stopped short, for the woman was in the room.

"Pauline, go _yourself_ to Baudran's, and ask why my hat has not yet
been sent."

Then the Countess reseated herself and scrutinized her mother. The
Marquise, with a swelling heart and dry eyes, in painful agitation,
which none but a mother can fully understand, began to open Moina's eyes
to the risk that she was running. But either the Countess felt hurt
and indignant at her mother's suspicions of a son of the Marquis de
Vandenesse, or she was seized with a sudden fit of inexplicable levity
caused by the inexperience of youth. She took advantage of a pause.

"Mamma, I thought you were only jealous of _the father_--" she said,
with a forced laugh.

Mme. d'Aiglemont shut her eyes and bent her head at the words, with a
very faint, almost inaudible sigh. She looked up and out into space,
as if she felt the common overmastering impulse to appeal to God at the
great crises of our lives; then she looked at her daughter, and her eyes
were full of awful majesty and the expression of profound sorrow.

"My child," she said, and her voice was hardly recognizable, "you have
been less merciful to your mother than he against whom she sinned; less
merciful than perhaps God Himself will be!"

Mme. d'Aiglemont rose; at the door she turned; but she saw nothing but
surprise in her daughter's face. She went out. Scarcely had she reached
the garden when her strength failed her. There was a violent pain at her
heart, and she sank down on a bench. As her eyes wandered over the path,
she saw fresh marks on the path, a man's footprints were distinctly
recognizable. It was too late, then, beyond a doubt. Now she began to
understand the reason for that order given to Pauline, and with these
torturing thoughts came a revelation more hateful than any that had
gone before it. She drew her own inferences--the son of the Marquis
de Vandenesse ha