somewhat Arab--like profile of this girl--a profile brought out
distinctly against the dark-red silk background of a screen, much as we
see a cameo stand out in sharp relief from the glittering stone from
which the artist has fashioned it. Marien looked at her from a distance,
leaning against the fireplace of the farther salon, whence he could see
plainly the corner shaded by green foliage plants where Jacqueline had
made her niche, as she called it. The two rooms formed practically but
one, being separated only by a large recess without folding-doors, or
'portires'. Hubert Marien, from his place behind Madame de Nailles's
chair, had often before watched Jacqueline as he was watching her at this
moment. She had grown up, as it were, under his own eye. He had seen her
playing with her dolls, absorbed in her story-books, and crunching
sugar-plums, he had paid her visits--for how many years? He did not care
to count them.

And little girls bloom fast! How old they make us feel! Who would have
supposed the most unpromising of little buds would have transformed
itself so soon into what he gazed upon? Marien, as an artist, had great
pleasure in studying the delicate outline of that graceful head
surmounted by thick tresses, with rebellious ringlets rippling over the
brow before they were gathered into the thick braid that hung behind; and
Jacqueline, although she appeared to be wholly occupied with her guests,
felt the gaze that was fixed upon her, and was conscious of its magnetic
influence, from which nothing would have induced her to escape even had
she been able. All the young girls were listening attentively (despite
their more serious occupation of consuming dainties) to what was going on
in the next room among the grown-up people, whose conversation reached
them only in detached fragments.

So long as the subject talked about was the last reception at the French
Academy, these young girls (comrades in the class-room and at the weekly
catechising) had been satisfied to discuss together their own little
affairs, but after Colonel de Valdonjon began to talk complete silence
reigned among them. One might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Their
attention, however, was of little use. Exclamations of oh! and ah! and
protests more or less sincere drowned even the loud and somewhat hoarse
voice of the Colonel. The girls heard it only through a sort of general
murmur, out of which a burst of astonishment or of dissent would
occa