When Saccard had left her, she hastily dressed herself and had the horses put to. While her brougham was conveying her towards the Île Saint-Louis, she prepared the manner in which she would ask her father for the fifty thousand francs. She flung herself into this sudden idea, without consenting to discuss it, feeling very cowardly at the bottom of her heart and seized with invincible fright at the thought of such a step. When she arrived, the courtyard of the Béraud mansion froze her with its mournful, cloister-like dampness, and it was with a desire to run away that she mounted the broad stone staircase on which her little high-heeled boots resounded terribly. She had been foolish enough in her haste to choose a costume of dead-leaf tinted silk, with long flounces of white lace trimmed with bows of ribbon and cut athwart by a plaited sash. This toilet, which was completed by a little hat with a large white veil, set such a singular note in the dark gloom of the staircase, that she herself became conscious of how strange she looked there. She trembled as she crossed the austere suite of spacious rooms, where the personages vaguely visible on the tapestry seemed surprised to see this stream of skirts pass by in the semi-daylight of their solitude. She found her father in a drawing-room looking on to the courtyard, where he habitually remained. He was reading a large book placed on a desk adapted to the arms of his chair. In front of one of the windows Aunt Élisabeth sat knitting with long wooden needles; and in the silence of the room the tick-tack of these needles was the only sound one heard. Renée sat down, ill at ease, unable to make a movement without disturbing the severity of the lofty ceiling by a noise of rustling silk. Her laces looked crudely white against the dark background of tapestry and old furniture. Monsieur Béraud Du Châtel gazed at her with his hands resting on the edge of the desk. Aunt Élisabeth talked about the approaching wedding of Christine who was to marry the son of a very rich attorney; the young girl had gone to a tradesman's with an old family servant; and the good aunt talked on alone, in her placid voice, without ceasing to knit, gossiping about household affairs, and casting smiling glances at Renée from above her spectacles. But, the young woman became more and more disturbed. All the silence of the house weighed upon her shoulders, and she would have given a great deal for the lace of her dress to have been black. Her father's gaze embarrassed her to such a point that she considered Worms really ridiculous to have imagined such high flounces. "How smart you are, my girl!" suddenly said Aunt Élisabeth, who had not yet even noticed her niece's lace. She stopped knitting and settled her spectacles to see the better. Monsieur Béraud Du Châtel gave a faint smile. "It is rather white," said he. "A woman must be greatly embarrassed with that on the side-walks."