reshold of the salon, seized
his hand and pressed it nervously within her own soft one and said
quickly:

"You will return, oh! I beg you! Ah! it is too bad to have run away! You
will come back!"

She was at once entreating and commanding him. Rosas did not reply, but
she felt in the trembling of his hand, as he pressed her own, in his
brilliant glance, that she would see him again. And since he had
returned to Paris alone, weary of being absent from her, perhaps, seeing
that he had hastened back after having desired to free himself from her,
did it not seem this time that he was wholly captivated?

All this was expressed by a pressure of the fingers, a glance, a sigh.

Rosas went rapidly away, like one distracted. Marianne, who motioned to
Uncle Kayser to disappear, reappeared in the studio, entirely
self-possessed.

Vaudrey had risen from the divan on which he had been sitting and he was
standing, waiting.

"I believed that I understood that you had dismissed Monsieur de Rosas?"

"I might have told you that I did so, since it is true."

"You smiled at him, nevertheless, just now."

"Yes."

"A man who begged you to be his mistress!"

"And whom I rejected, yes!"

She looked at Sulpice with her winsome, sidelong glance, curling her
lovely pink lips that he had kissed so many times.

"Then you love that man?"

"I! not at all, only it is flattering to me to have him return like
that, just like some penitent little boy."

"I do not understand--"

"_Parbleu!_ you are not a woman, that is all that that proves!--It is
irritating to our self-love to see people too promptly accept the
dismissal one gives them. What! Don't they suffer? Don't they say
anything? Don't they complain? Monsieur de Rosas comes back to me, that
proves that he was hurt, and I triumph. Now, do you understand?"

"And--that joy that I observed is--?"

"It is because Monsieur de Rosas is in Paris."

"And you don't love him? You don't love him?" asked Vaudrey, clasping
Marianne's hands in his.

She laughed and said:

"I do not love him in the least."

"And you love me?"

"Yes, you, I love you!"

"Marianne, you know that it would be very wicked and wrong to lie! It is
not necessary to love me at all if you must cease to love me!"

"In other words, one should never lend money unless one is obliged to
lend one's whole fortune."

He felt extremely dissatisfied with Marianne's ironical remark. She
looked at him with an odd expre