Marianne was heartbroken anew at this unexpected departure. A hope had vanished. She loved Guy very sincerely, and she vainly hoped that she would hold him. He fled from her! Whither had he gone? For a moment, she was tempted to rejoin him when she received his letters. She surmised, however, that Guy, desiring to avoid her, caused his brief notes to be sent by some friend from towns that he had left. To play there the absurd part of a woman chasing her lover would have been ridiculous. She remained, therefore, disgusted, heartbroken for a moment like a widow in despair, then she retraced her steps to the Rue de Navarin, and returned to the fold, where she found Uncle Kayser still quite unruffled, with the almost finished picture of _The Modern Family_. "That is, I verily believe, the best I have done, the most moral," said Kayser to her. "In art, morality before everything, my girl! Come, sit down and tell me your little adventures." It was five years--five whole years--since Lissac had seen Marianne. Their passion had subsided little by little into friendship,--expressed though by letters. Marianne wrote, Guy replied. All the bitter reproofs had been exchanged through the post, yet, in spite of this correspondence, neither had sought the opportunity nor felt the desire to meet. The fancy was dead! Nevertheless, they had loved each other well! Suddenly, without overtures, on this bitingly cold morning, Marianne arrived, half shivering, in the new apartment, warmed her tiny feet at the fire and raised to him the rosy tip of her cold nose. Guy was somewhat surprised. He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,--the innocents say to die of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes, sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love of this blase Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had agreeably affected him. Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest, she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.