The ivory-like pallor of this red-haired man with sunken eyes and trembling lips, almost cold when she sought them under his tawny moustache, pleased her. She sometimes said to him that under his gentle manner he had the appearance of a tiger. "Or of a cat, and that pleases me, for I am myself of that nature. Ah! how I love you!" She felt herself tremble with fear of that being whom she felt that she had conquered and who was entirely hers, but she was strangely troubled in divining some of his secret thoughts. She was in a hurry to have the marriage concluded. Secretly if it were desired, but legally and positively. She dreaded Jose's reawakening, as it were. She did not know how, perhaps an anonymous letter, a chance meeting with Guy, an explanation, who knows? "Although, after all," she thought, "I have been foolish to trouble myself about this Guy. Word threats, that's all!" The duke had treated her as a virtuous girl, requiring her to declare that she had never loved any but him, or that, at least, no living person had the right to say that he had possessed her. She had sworn all that he desired, saying to Uncle Kayser: "Oaths like that are like political promises, they bind one to nothing!" The uncle began to entertain an extravagant admiration for his "little Marianne." There is a woman, sure enough! Wonderful elegance! She had promised to have a studio built for him, in which he could, instead of painting, take his ease, stretched on a divan, smoking his pipe, and pass his days in floating to the ceiling his theories of high and moral art! An ideal picture! He also was in favor of prompt action in respect to the marriage. As little noise as possible. The least hitch and all was lost. What a pity! "Do you wish me to tell you? It seems to me that you are walking to the mayor's office on eggs!" "Be easy," Marianne replied, laughing heartily, "there will be none broken." The marriage was celebrated. At last! as Kayser said. It was a formality rather than a ceremony. Marianne, ravishingly beautiful, was exultant at realizing her dream. Her pale complexion took on tints of the bloom of the azalea pierced by the rays of the sun. Never had Rosas seen her so lovely. How stupidly he had acted formerly in yielding to appearances and flying from her, instead of telling her that he loved her. He had lost whole years of love that he would never recover, even in the blissful fever of this union. Those joys, formerly disdained, were, alas! never to be restored. Ah! how he would love her now, adore her and keep her with him as his living delight! They would travel; in three days they would set out for Italy. The baggage already filled the house in the Avenue Montaigne, their nuptial mansion. Marianne would take away all the souvenirs that she had preserved in the grisette's little room at Rue Cuvier, where Rosas had so often seen her and where he had said to her: "I love you!" "People took their penates," she said, "but I take my fetishes!"