de 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
occasionally break forth. These outbreaks were all the curious group
could hear distinctly. They sniffed, as it were, at the forbidden fruit,
but they longed to inhale the full perfume of the scandal that they felt
was in the air. That stout officer of cuirassiers, of whom some people
spoke as "The Chatterbox," took advantage of his profession to tell many
an unsavory story which he had picked up or invented at his club. He