Angelot said it was
impossible; he must be ill, he must die, if he could not stretch his
legs and breathe the open air. Every day Henriette, when her father was
out, allowed him to race up and down the stairs, played at hide-and-seek
with him in the passages, let him dance her round and round the lower
rooms. Or else she played games with him, cards, chess, tric-trac; or
he lay and listened to her while she told him fairy tales; listened with
a dreamy half-understanding, with a certainty, underlying all his
impatience, that there was nothing to live for now. What did it matter,
after all? One moment, life and hope and youth made him thrill and
tremble in every limb; the next, his fate weighed upon him like a
millstone; he laid his head down on the broad pillow of the sofa, and
while Henriette chattered his eyelashes were sometimes wet. All was
settled now. He must be banished to England, to Germany, banished in a
cause he did not care for, in which he was involved against his will.
Never again should he walk with his gun and Nego, light-hearted, over
his own old country. Never again, more certainly, should he see Helene,
feel the maddening sweetness of her touch, her kiss. There was to be a
ball. Henriette told him all about it; he heard of his cousin Herve's
visit, and was half amused, half miserable. Helene would dance; white
and slender, her eyes full of sadness. She would dance with other men,
thinking, he knew, of her lost friend, her Angelot. In time, one of them
would be presented to her as her husband. Not Ratoneau; Angelot had her
father's word for that, and he drew a long breath when he thought of it.
But some one else; that was inevitable. Ah! as life must pass, why
cannot it pass more quickly? Why must every day have such an endless
number of hours and minutes? What torture is there greater than this of
waiting, stifled and idle, for a fate arranged in spite of one's self?

Henriette flitted in and out, eager and earnest like her father. After
Monsieur Joseph's visit to La Mariniere, he sent her there one day with
Marie, and she was embraced by her aunt Anne with a quite new passion of
tenderness, and trusted with a letter and a huge parcel of necessaries
for Angelot's journey. Monsieur Joseph laughed a little angrily over
these.

"Tiens, mon petit! your mother thinks you are going to drive to the
coast in a chaise and four," he said; but Angelot bent his head very
gravely over the coats and the shirts tha