Another interruption from Ida; who, later, when she saw her poet in a fit of the sulks, wondered what she had done to displease him. Two or three times during dinner she was quite ready to weep, but did her best to hide her feelings by urging all the delicacies of her table upon M. and Madame Moronval. Dinner over, and the guests established in the well warmed and lighted salon, the principal fancied he saw his way clear, and said suddenly, in a half indifferent tone, to the countess,— “I have thought much of our little matter of business. It will cost less than I fancied.” “Indeed!” she answered absently, “If, madame, you would accord to me a few moments of your attention—” But madame was occupied in looking at her poet, who was walking up and down the salon silent and preoccupied. “Of what can he be thinking?” she said to herself. Of his digestion only, dear reader. Suffering somewhat from dyspepsia, and always anxious in regard to his health, he never failed, on leaving the table, to walk for half an hour, no matter where he might chance to be. Ida watched him silently. For the first time in her life she loved, really and passionately, and felt her heart beat as it had never beat before. Foolish and ignorant, while at the same time credulous and romantic; very near that fatal age—thirty years—which is almost certain to create in woman a great transformation; she now, aided by the memory of every romance she had ever read, created for herself an ideal who resembled D’Argenton. The expression of her face so changed in looking at him, her laughing eyes assumed so tender an expression, that her passion soon ceased to be a mystery to any one. Moronval, who looked on, shrugged his shoulders, with a glance at his wife. “She is simply crazy,” he said to himself. She certainly was crazed in a degree; and, after dinner, she tormented herself to find some way of returning to the good graces of D’Argenton, and, as he approached her in his walk, she said,— “If M. d’Argenton wished to be very amiable, he would recite to us that beautiful poem which created such a sensation the other evening. I have thought of it all the week. There is one verse that haunts me, especially the final line: ‘And I believe in love, As I believe in a good God above.’” “As I believe in God above,” said the poet, making as horrible a grimace as if his finger had been caught in a vice. The countess, who had but a vague idea of prosody, understood simply that she had again incurred the displeasure of D’Argenton. The fact is that he had begun to affect her in a manner quite beyond her own control, and which, in its unreasoning terror, was somewhat like the timid worship offered by the Japanese to their hideous idols.