Hortense was thirty. She owed her name to certain Bonapartist sentiments which, in her family, had survived by a few years the events of 1870. Certain elegant habits of thought and manners had also been preserved. Her father, M. d'Urville had been one of the actors of Octave Feuillet's comedies, in this same Compiègne where they were now arriving. At the age when girls begin to forget that there are such things as dolls, she had read the complete works of this shy passionate writer; her mother did not forbid her to look at the _Vie Parisienne_, in which her happy frivolity had never seen anything that might be dangerous for a well-bred girl. And so, when she married, Hortense knew that though marriage may be a garden surrounded by a wall, there are ladders to climb over this wall; the only things she thought of in her husband were rank, fortune and the conventions. Her first lover had been a young officer, with whom, as with Leonor, she had lost her way hunting; only with him it had been a stag-hunt. Leonor had participated only at an ordinary shoot, M. de la Mesangerie, in view of the present hard times, having broken up his pack of hounds. That affair had been of the most fugitive character. Afterward she had received the advances of M. de la Cloche, a once celebrated member of the Chamber of Deputies; but M. de la Cloche voted the wrong way, and under the cloak of political reasons M. de la Mesangerie closed his doors to him, in spite of his wife, who concealed a real though momentary despair. Finally M. Leonor Varin came to stay at La Mesangerie to superintend certain repairs to the fine Louis XIII house. In this chilly young man, so cold and yet so romantic as well as sensual, Hortense had found a more durable love, which greatly increased her happiness. Under a very skilfully calculated reserve, she adored Leonor, who had, on his side, always shown himself obedient, respectful, adroit and tender. She realised that the furtive pleasures which she was able to give him without compromising herself did not altogether satisfy her lover. She too, in whom the avid sensuality of the woman of thirty had begun to wake, desired pleasures of a less rapid and more complicated nature. Leonor's kisses and the words he whispered had little by little filled her imagination with images which she wanted to see in real life. How often she had thought of running away! Two days in Paris! And now her husband had given her these two days himself. When she said, "I'm glad" she was confessing to the existence of a happiness in which it still seemed impossible wholly to believe. She pressed herself close to Leonor. "Is it true? Are we really both of us here, alone and free?" In a whisper she added, her bosom heaving with precipitate waves, "I shall be yours, absolutely yours, at last." "All mine, all?" asked Leonor, touching her mouth with his own. "I belong to you." She had the wisdom to withdraw, and looking out of the window she asked: "Where are we?"