th a faint smile, adding:
"It is nothing."

"What an imprudent child you are!" said Dorsenne in his tone of friendly
scolding. "Do you know that you might have severed an artery and have
caused a very serious, perhaps a fatal, hemorrhage?"

"That would not have been such a great misfortune," replied Alba,
shaking her pretty head with an expression so bitter about her mouth
that the young man, too, ceased smiling.

"Do not speak in that tone," said he, "or I shall think you did it
purposely."

"Purposely?" repeated the young girl. "Purposely? Why should I have done
it purposely?"

And she blushed and laughed in the same nervous way she had laughed
fifteen minutes before, when she looked down into the street. Dorsenne
felt that she was suffering, and his heart contracted. The trouble
against which he had struggled for several days with all the energy
of an independent artist, and which for some time systematized his
celibacy, again oppressed him. He thought it time to put between "folly"
and him the irreparability of his categorical resolution. So he replied
to his little friend with his habitual gentleness, but in a tone of
firmness, which already announced his determination:

"I have again vexed you, Contessina, and you are looking at me with the
glance of our hours of dispute. You will later regret having been unkind
to-day."

As he pronounced those enigmatical words, she saw that he had in his
eyes and in his smile something different and indefinable. It must have
been that she loved him still more than she herself believed as for a
second she forgot both her pain and her resolution, and she asked him,
quickly:

"You have some trouble? You are suffering? What is it?"

"Nothing," replied Dorsenne. "But time is flying, the minutes are going
by, and not only the minutes. There is an old and charming. French ode,
which you do not know and which begins:

'Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, Madame.
Las, le temps? Non. Mais nous nous en allons.'"

"Which means, little Countess, in simple prose, that this is no doubt
the last conversation we shall have together this season, and that it
would be cruel to mar for me this last visit."

"Do I understand you aright?" said Alba. She, too, knew too well
Julien's way of speaking not to know that that mannerism, half-mocking,
half-sentimental, always served him to prepare phrases more grave,
and against the emotion of which her fear of appearing a dupe rose