The words escaped her lips as it were impulsively; she became confused; even her eyes blushed, and her face bore no other expression than one of exquisite simplicity of feeling; she softly released the young man’s hand, not from shame at having pressed it, but because of a thought too weighty, it seemed, for her heart to bear, leaving him drunk with hope. Suddenly she appeared to regret this freedom, permissible as it might be under the passing circumstances of a journey. She recovered her conventional manner, bowed to the lady and her son, and taking Francine with her, left the room. When they reached their own chamber Francine wrung her hands and tossed her arms, as she looked at her mistress, saying: “Ah, Marie, what a crowd of things in a moment of time! who but you would have such adventures?” Mademoiselle de Verneuil sprang forward and clasped Francine round the neck. “Ah! this is life indeed--I am in heaven!” “Or hell,” retorted Francine. “Yes, hell if you like!” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “Here, give me your hand; feel my heart, how it beats. There’s fever in my veins; the whole world is now a mere nothing to me! How many times have I not seen that man in my dreams! Oh! how beautiful his head is--how his eyes sparkle!” “Will he love you?” said the simple peasant-woman, in a quivering voice, her face full of sad foreboding. “How can you ask me that!” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “But, Francine, tell me,” she added throwing herself into a pose that was half serious, half comic, “will it be very hard to love me?” “No, but will he love you always?” replied Francine, smiling. They looked at each other for a moment speechless,--Francine at revealing so much knowledge of life, and Marie at the perception, which now came to her for the first time, of a future of happiness in her passion. She seemed to herself hanging over a gulf of which she had wanted to know the depth, and listening to the fall of the stone she had flung, at first heedlessly, into it. “Well, it is my own affair,” she said, with the gesture of a gambler. “I should never pity a betrayed woman; she has no one but herself to blame if she is abandoned. I shall know how to keep, either living or dead, the man whose heart has once been mine. But,” she added, with some surprise and after a moment’s silence, “where did you get your knowledge of love, Francine?” “Mademoiselle,” said the peasant-woman, hastily, “hush, I hear steps in the passage.” “Ah! not _his_ steps!” said Marie, listening. “But you are evading an answer; well, well, I’ll wait for it, or guess it.” Francine was right, however. Three taps on the door interrupted the conversation. Captain Merle appeared, after receiving Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s permission to enter. With a military salute to the lady, whose beauty dazzled him, the soldier ventured on giving her a glance, but he found nothing better to say than: “Mademoiselle, I am at your orders.”