“Why did not Madame de Chaulieu come to Havre?” asked Modeste of Helene, innocently. “My dear,” said the Duchesse de Verneuil, “she would let herself be cut in little pieces without saying a word. Look at her,--she is regal; her head would smile, like Mary Stuart’s, after it was cut off; in fact, she has some of that blood in her veins.” “Did she not write to him?” asked Modeste. “Diane tells me,” answered the duchess, prompted by a nudge from Mademoiselle d’Herouville, “that in answer to Canalis’s first letter she made a cutting reply a few days ago.” This explanation made Modeste blush with shame for the man before her; she longed, not to crush him under her feet, but to revenge herself by one of those malicious acts that are sharper than a dagger’s thrust. She looked haughtily at the Duchesse de Chaulieu-- “Monsieur Melchior!” she said. All the women snuffed the air and looked alternately at the duchess, who was talking in an undertone to Canalis over the embroidery-frame, and then at the young girl so ill brought up as to disturb a lovers’ meeting,--a thing not permissible in any society. Diane de Maufrigneuse nodded, however, as much as to say, “The child is in the right of it.” All the women ended by smiling at each other; they were enraged with a woman who was fifty-six years old and still handsome enough to put her fingers into the treasury and steal the dues of youth. Melchior looked at Modeste with feverish impatience, and made the gesture of a master to a valet, while the duchess lowered her head with the movement of a lioness disturbed at a meal; her eyes, fastened on the canvas, emitted red flames in the direction of the poet, which stabbed like epigrams, for each word revealed to her a triple insult. “Monsieur Melchior!” said Modeste again in a voice that asserted its right to be heard. “What, mademoiselle?” demanded the poet. Forced to rise, he remained standing half-way between the embroidery frame, which was near a window, and the fireplace where Modeste was seated with the Duchesse de Verneuil on a sofa. What bitter reflections came into his ambitious mind, as he caught a glance from Eleonore. If he obeyed Modeste all was over, and forever, between himself and his protectress. Not to obey her was to avow his slavery, to lose the chances of his twenty-five days of base manoeuvring, and to disregard the plainest laws of decency and civility. The greater the folly, the more imperatively the duchess exacted it. Modeste’s beauty and money thus pitted against Eleonore’s rights and influence made this hesitation between the man and his honor as terrible to witness as the peril of a matador in the arena. A man seldom feels such palpitations as those which now came near causing Canalis an aneurism, except, perhaps, before the green table, where his fortune or his ruin is about to be decided. “Mademoiselle d’Herouville hurried me from the carriage, and I left behind me,” said Modeste to Canalis, “my handkerchief--”