She said to him with mingled fatuity and commiseration: "I thought that was the case when I received your telegram, and that was the reason that I came, with the resolve that I would go back again at once if I found that I had made a mistake." She was silent a moment and then went on: "Since I am not going back immediately, may I go and look around your place? That little alley of lindens yonder has a very charming appearance: it looks as if it might be cooler out there than here in this drawing-room." They went out. She had on a mauve dress that harmonized so well with the verdure of the trees and the blue of the sky that she appeared to him like some amazing apparition, of an entirely new style of beauty and seductiveness. Her tall and willowy form, her bright, clean-cut features, the little blaze of blond hair beneath a hat that was mauve, like the dress, and lightly crowned by a long plume of ostrich-feathers rolled about it, her tapering arms with the two hands holding the closed sunshade crosswise before her, the loftiness of her carriage, and the directness of her step seemed to introduce into the humble little garden something exotic, something that was foreign to it. It was a figure from one of Watteau's pictures, or from some fairy-tale or dream, the imagination of a poet's or an artist's fancy, which had been seized by the whim of coming away to the country to show how beautiful it was. As Mariolle looked at her, all trembling with his newly lighted passion, he recalled to mind the two peasant women that he had seen in Montigny village. "Who is the little person who opened the door for me?" she inquired. "She is my servant." "She does not look like a waitress." "No; she is very good looking." "Where did you secure her?" "Quite near here; in an inn frequented by painters, where her innocence was in danger from the customers." "And you preserved it?" He blushed and replied: "Yes, I preserved it." "To your own advantage, perhaps." "Certainly, to my own advantage, for I would rather have a pretty face about me than an ugly one." "Is that the only feeling that she inspires in you?" "Perhaps it was she who inspired in me the irresistible desire of seeing you again, for every woman when she attracts my eyes, even if it is only for the duration of a second, carries my thoughts back to you." "That was a very pretty piece of special pleading! And does she love her preserver?" He blushed more deeply than before. Quick as lightning the thought flashed through his mind that jealousy is always efficacious as a stimulant to a woman's feelings, and decided him to tell only half a lie, so he answered, hesitatingly: "I don't know how that is; it may be so. She is very attentive to me." Rather pettishly, Mme. de Burne murmured: "And you?" He fastened upon her his eyes that were aflame with love, and replied: "Nothing could ever distract my thoughts from you."