fate. That stupid Guy leaves for Italy.
Rosas leaves for England. Steam was invented to admit of escape from
dangerous women. I did not follow Lissac. What if I followed the duke?"

She shrugged her shoulders, and gnawed her cambric handkerchief under
her veil, her head resting on the back of the coach, while the driver
waited, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, ignorant of the
direction in which the young woman wished to go.

Marianne felt herself beaten. She was like a gambler who loses a
decisive game. Evidently, Rosas only showed more clearly by the action
he had taken, how much he was smitten; she measured his love by her own
dismay; but what was the good of that love, if the duke escaped in a
cowardly fashion?--But where could she find him? Where follow him? Where
write to him?--A man who runs about as he does! A madman! Perhaps on
arriving at Dover he had already re-embarked for Japan or Australia.

"Ah! the unexpected happens, it seems," thought Marianne, laughing
maliciously, as she considered the ludicrousness of her failure.

"Madame, we are going--?" indifferently asked the coachman, who was
tired of waiting.

"Where you please--to the Bois!"

"Very good, madame."

He looked at his huge aluminum watch, coolly remarking:

"It was a quarter of twelve when I took Madame--"

"Good! good!--to the Bois!"

The movement of the carriage, the sight of the passers-by, the sunlight
playing on the fountains and the paving-stones of the Place de la
Concorde fully occupied Marianne's mind, although irritating her at the
same time. All the cheerfulness attending the awakening spring,
delightful as it is in Paris, seemed irony to her. She felt again, but
with increased bitterness, all the sentiments she experienced a few
mornings previously when she called on Guy and told him of her
burdensome weariness and distaste of life. Of what use was she now? She
had just built so many fond dreams on hope! And all her edifices had
crumbled.

"All has to be recommenced. To lead the stupid life of a needy, lost,
harassed woman; no, that is too ridiculous, too sad! What then--" she
said to herself, as with fixed eyes she gazed into the infinite and
discovered no solution.

She was savagely annoyed at Rosas. She would have liked to tear him in
pieces like the handkerchief that she shredded. Ah! if he should ever
return to her after this flight!

But perhaps it was not a flight--who knows? The duke would write