"I want to speak to you," she said. The Marquise looked at her in astonishment. She loved her like an egotistical mother, proud of her beauty, as a person is proud of a fortune, too pretty still herself to become jealous, too indifferent to plan the schemes with which they charged her, too clever, nevertheless, not to have full consciousness of her daughter's value. "I am listening, my child," she said; "what is it?" Yvette gave her a piercing look, as if to read the depths of her soul and to seize all the sensations which her words might awake. "It is this. Something strange has just happened." "What can it be?" "Monsieur de Servigny has told me that he loves me." The Marquise, disturbed, waited a moment, and, as Yvette said nothing more, she asked: "How did he tell you that? Explain yourself!" Then the young girl, sitting at her mother's feet, in a coaxing attitude common with her, and clasping her hands, added: "He asked me to marry him." Madame Obardi made a sudden gesture of stupefaction and cried: "Servigny! Why! you are crazy!" Yvette had not taken her eyes off her mother's face, watching her thoughts and her surprise. She asked with a serious voice: "Why am I crazy? Why should not Monsieur de Servigny marry me?" The Marquise, embarrassed, stammered: "You are mistaken, it is not possible. You either did not hear or did not understand. Monsieur de Servigny is too rich for you, and too much of a Parisian to marry." Yvette rose softly. She added: "But if he loves me as he says he does, mamma?" Her mother replied, with some impatience: "I thought you big enough and wise enough not to have such ideas. Servigny is a man-about-town and an egotist. He will never marry anyone but a woman of his set and his fortune. If he asked you in marriage, it is only that he wants--" The Marquise, incapable of expressing her meaning, was silent for a moment, then continued: "Come now, leave me alone and go to bed." And the young girl, as if she had learned what she sought to find out, answered in a docile voice: "Yes, mamma!" She kissed her mother on the forehead and withdrew with a calm step. As she reached the door, the Marquise called out: "And your sunstroke?" she said. "I did not have one at all. It was that which caused everything." The Marquise added: "We will not speak of it again. Only don't stay alone with him for some time from now, and be very sure that he will never marry you, do you understand, and that he merely means to--compromise you."