Just to go steadily forward: yes, but this unexpected halt, with its startling revelation, had suddenly made of that plain road a rather formidable maze. Had he appeared, noticeably appeared, to be making too personal a matter of this business? Then how was a part so impassioned to be played in a spirit of aloofness? He swore he was loyal to his mission, loyal to his friend, that he was a man of honour, that he had never consciously wavered in his fidelity. Of course he had not. The devil knows better than to inoculate his victims perceptibly. It is a very favourite trick of his to encourage a man, who knows nothing whatever about moral architecture, to build over-heavily upon his moral strength. Tiretta was so confident in his, that he had never thought of questioning its capacity for supporting any test. He did not now; he would not, Fanchette and all such mischievous gossips despite. He was just, he flattered himself, beginning to succeed in his romantic undertaking, and to feel a certain thrill in the near accomplishment of a task which had once promised to prove so distasteful. To withdraw now would certainly seem to give a colour to calumny. If only for the lady’s sake, he must prosecute his purpose to its triumphant end. What a chivalrous Tiretta, to be sure; but indeed, he was not yet so conscious of his own state as to be guilty of lying to himself in the matter. And in the meantime Mademoiselle Fanchette stood and looked after the retreating figure, and curtsied derisively to its back. “You are a very pretty gentleman,” she said: “but I know a prettier.” She had that other in her mind’s eye. He was also a musician, but of a very different “tone,” so to speak. He did not deal in the visionary stuff of dreams, but in the practical material of courtship--the sort of suitor a woman could understand. He set adorable words to intelligible music; one was at no trouble with him to puzzle out sentiments which fitted themselves quite naturally into the love-traffic they recorded and provoked. And he too was handsome, but in a braver, bolder way, wooing, as a man should, by compulsion. She was in fact very much under the thrall of this cavalier, though still coquetting--for business’ sake, as some Frenchwomen will--with the thought of capitulation.