t and rose to his feet:

"You!" he cried, stepping back. "You here, Suzanne!"

A most attractive creature stood before him, at once smiling and
bashful, in an attitude of provocation and fear, with hands clasped,
then with arms again outstretched, beautiful, white, fragrant arms that
showed below the short sleeves of her fine cambric blouse. Her fair hair
was divided into two loose waves, whose rebellious curls played about
at random. She had grey, almond-shaped eyes, half-veiled by their dark
lashes; and her tiny teeth laughed at the edge of her red lips, lips so
red that one would have thought--and been quite wrong in thinking--that
they were painted.

It was Suzanne Jorance, the daughter of Jorance the special commissary
and a friend of Marthe, who knew her when she was quite a child at
Luneville. Suzanne had spent four months, last winter, in Paris with the
Philippe Morestals.

"You!" he repeated. "You, Suzanne!"

She replied, gaily:

"Myself. Your father came to call on us at Saint-Elophe. And, as mine
was out for a walk, he brought me back with him. I have just got out of
the carriage. And here I am."

He seized her by the wrists, in a fit of anger, and, in a hollow voice:

"You had no business to be at Saint-Elophe. You wrote to Marthe that you
were going away this morning. You ought not to have stayed. You know
quite well that you ought not to have stayed."

"Why?" she asked, quite confused.

"Why? Because, at the end of your visit to Paris, you spoke to me in
words which I was entitled to interpret ... which I took to mean ...
And I would not have come, if you had not written that you were...."

He broke off, embarrassed by the violence of his own outburst. The tears
stood in Suzanne's eyes and her face had flushed so deep a red that her
crimson lips seemed hardly red at all.

Petrified by the words which he had uttered and still more by those
which he had been on the verge of uttering, Philippe suddenly, in the
girl's presence, felt a need to be gentle and friendly and to make
amends for his inexplicable rudeness. An unexpected sense of pity
softened him. He took the small, ice-cold hands between his own and
said, kindly, with the intonation of a big brother scolding a younger
sister:

"Why did you stay, Suzanne?"

"May I tell you, Philippe?"

"Certainly, or I shouldn't ask you," he replied, a little nervously.

"I wanted to see you, Philippe.... When I knew that you were coming ...
and th