In the meantime, Genevieve de Baraglioul, Count Julius’s elder daughter--for it was she, on her way back from the Hospital for Sick Children, where she went every morning--had been far more agitated than Lafcadio by this second meeting, and hurrying home as quickly as she could, she had entered the front door just as Lafcadio had turned into the street, and was already nearing the second floor, when the sound of rapid steps behind her made her look round; someone was coming upstairs more quickly than she; she stood aside to let the person pass, but when she recognized Lafcadio, who stopped, petrified, in front of her: “Is it worthy of you,” she said in as angry a tone as she could muster, “to follow me like this?” “Oh! what can you think of me?” cried Lafcadio. “I’m afraid you’ll not believe me when I say that I didn’t see you coming into this house--that I’m extremely astonished to meet you here. Isn’t this where Count Julius de Baraglioul lives?” “What?” said Genevieve, blushing; “can you be the new secretary my father is expecting? Monsieur Lafcadio Wlou ... you have such a peculiar name, I don’t know how to pronounce it.” And as Lafcadio, blushing in his turn, bowed, she went on: “Since I’ve met you, may I ask you as a favour not to speak to my parents about yesterday’s adventure, which I don’t think would be at all to their taste; and particularly not to say anything about my purse, which I told them I had lost.” “I was going to ask you myself to say nothing about the absurd part you saw me play in the business. I’m like your parents; I don’t at all understand it or approve of it. You must have taken me for a Newfoundland. I couldn’t restrain myself. Forgive me. I have much to learn.... But I shall learn in time, I promise you.... Will you give me your hand?” Genevieve de Baraglioul, who did not own to herself that she thought Lafcadio very handsome, did not own to Lafcadio that, far from thinking him ridiculous, she had set him up as the image of a hero. She held out her hand to him and he raised it impetuously to his lips; then smiling simply, she begged him to go down a few steps and wait till she had gone in and shut the door before ringing in his turn, so that they might not be seen together; and he was to take special care not to show that they had ever met before. A few minutes later Lafcadio was ushered into the novelist’s study. Julius’s welcome was kindly and encouraging; Julius, however, was a blunderer; the young man immediately assumed the defensive. “I must begin by warning you, M. le Comte, that I can’t abide either gratitude or debts; and whatever you may do for me, you will never be able to make me feel that I am under any obligation to you.” Julius in his turn was nettled.