No, I shall not do it! You have fallen into no trap here, but upon the
heart of a woman who adores you, and it is I who will be cast into the
pit."

"All this appears to me prodigiously strange," said De Marsay,
considering her. "But you seem to me a good girl, a strange nature; you
are, upon my word of honor, a living riddle, the answer to which is very
difficult to find."

Paquita understood nothing of what the young man said; she looked at
him gently, opening wide eyes which could never be stupid, so much was
pleasure written in them.

"Come, then, my love," she said, returning to her first idea, "wouldst
thou please me?"

"I would do all that thou wouldst, and even that thou wouldst not,"
answered De Marsay, with a laugh. He had recovered his foppish ease, as
he took the resolve to let himself go to the climax of his good fortune,
looking neither before nor after. Perhaps he counted, moreover, on his
power and his capacity of a man used to adventures, to dominate this
girl a few hours later and learn all her secrets.

"Well," said she, "let me arrange you as I would like."

Paquita went joyously and took from one of the two chests a robe of red
velvet, in which she dressed De Marsay, then adorned his head with a
woman's bonnet and wrapped a shawl round him. Abandoning herself to
these follies with a child's innocence, she laughed a convulsive laugh,
and resembled some bird flapping its wings; but he saw nothing beyond.

If it be impossible to paint the unheard-of delights which these two
creatures--made by heaven in a joyous moment--found, it is perhaps
necessary to translate metaphysically the extraordinary and almost
fantastic impressions of the young man. That which persons in the social
position of De Marsay, living as he lived, are best able to recognize is
a girl's innocence. But, strange phenomenon! The girl of the golden eyes
might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic
union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and
beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been
met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime
being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most
refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses
which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this
girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they
made.

She wa