Blanchette was dancing round her cousin in the twilight of the January day, making her pied de nez triumphantly, but pausing every now and then to look up in her face with her habitual inquisitiveness, yet with a respect quite new to her.

‘Tiens, tiens, tiens!’ she was crying in her little shrill voice, like the tiniest of silver trumpets. ‘To think you are going to be married after all! You will be ever so much richer than mamma, they say; you will be as rich as all the Juiverie put together, and you will be as great a lady as all the grandes dames. You will have as many jewels as Madame de Talleyrand; you will have as many horses and houses as Madame de Sagan; you will have two new gowns every day if you like. Have you seen the HÔtel Othmar? I have seen it; it is as big as the Louvre. What will you ask him for first? If I were you, I should ask him for a rope of pearls, all as big as pigeons’ eggs. What are the Othmar liveries? I never saw them; the state liveries, I mean. I like canary-colour best, and Louis Treize tricornes. What will he settle on you? He will give you what you wish; I heard mamma say so. Make him give you S. Pharamond for your very own. I am sure you will not get half you might, you are such a silly little snipe; you are as tall as a Venetian mast on a feast day, but you are a simpleton. You cried when mamma told you he would marry you. The idea! You should have danced for joy. It would be delicious to marry him if he were as old as the hills and as ugly as Punch, but he is not old and he is handsome: all that par-dessus le panier, and thirty thousand francs a day, Julie says; and Brown and Schemmitz wanted to kiss your hand! What fun you would make of them if you were me. You should skip and shout all day;—I should. To be sure, he is dans la finance, but they are the only royalties nowadays; I have heard mamma say so. Whatever can he see in you? You are pretty and tall, but you don’t know it; you stand and stare like an owl with your big eyes. What can he want with you? He will give you everything, he must be a simpleton, too! he might marry somebody quite great; none of them can imagine what he wants you for——’

‘Oh, Blanchette!’ said Yseulte de Valogne, with a look of pain, as she tried to silence her little tormentor, whose words she only vaguely heard as she stood lost in the golden mists of an incomparable dream.

‘Vrai!’ said the cruel little child. ‘Nobody can think what he can see in you. It is Madame Napraxine whom he loves.’

Yseulte coloured with sudden anger, and a look of severity and sternness came on her youthful face, while its happy wistful eyes lost their light and grew cold:

‘You must not say these things, Blanchette,’ she said sternly; ‘you may laugh at me as you like, but you must respect M. Othmar.’

The red deepened in her cheeks as she spoke, and realised that she had the right to defend his name thus. She was thinking in herself as she did so: ‘If it were true, if I thought it were true, I would bury myself in the convent for ever.’

The quick little mind of Blanchette divined the direction of her thoughts, and dearly as the child loved to do mischief and to torment, she loved her own pleasure and gain better. She had no wish for this beau mariage to be broken off, as she foresaw from it endless diversion, gifts, and bonbons for herself.

‘Othmar will give us each at least a medallion with diamonds on the back,’ she reflected; and she was conscious, too, that if the marriage fell through by any doing of hers, her mother would be unsparing in her punishment, of which not the least portion would be banishment to Bois de Roy; for Blanchette adored her spring-time in Paris, her summer months at Deauville and Homburg and Biarritz, her wagers on the petits chevaux, her exploits in the water, and the many whispers of scandals and naughty witticisms which she caught, when apparently engrossed with her toy balloon or her ball, behind the chairs of her mother and other great ladies on the sand by the sea or under the trees of the fashionable inland baths.

With a rapid remembrance of all that she herself would lose if there were no grand wedding at which she would assist at the Madeleine or S. Philippe du Roule, she threw her arms about her cousin with her most coaxing cÂlinerie: ‘It was only my fun,’ she whispered; ‘ pray don’t tell any one, chÉrie. It was years and years ago that they laughed about Madame Napraxine; of course, it is you he loves now. Why should he marry you if he did not? He could marry anywhere, anybody,—mamma says so. And you are handsome, if you would only think it! Mamma says when you shall have been married a week, and have all your jewels you will be superb.’

Her cousin’s face flushed more warmly till it was the hue of those Charles Raybaud roses which she had used to pack for Nicole. Her heart beat in that tumult of emotion, of joy, and of vague, most sweet, fear, in which she had lived for the last twenty-four hours. She thought: ‘Why, if he did not care for me, why, indeed, should he seek me?’

It seemed marvellous to her that it should be so, but she could not doubt it.

She had only seen him for ten minutes that morning, in the presence of the Duchesse de Vannes, but though her confusion had been too great to let her eyes meet his, the few soft grave words he had spoken, and the touch of his lips on her hand, had left with her an ineffable sense of protection and affection received. If it were not for love, why should he have paused on his way to thrust back the gates of the convent and take her to himself?

As for herself, the timid, pure, half-unconscious feeling which he had awakened in her was growing in strength with every hour now that it had recognised its own existence and been permitted its expansion without shame. It remained as shy and fearful as a freshly captured wood-dove, but it had in it all the elements of an intense and devoted passion.

She did not hear the child’s chatter, which rippled on like a little brook, asking her a thousand questions of what she would do, of what she would wear, of what she would give away. Blanchette was herself half sympathetic, half envious; disposed to resent her cousin’s sudden and splendid change of destiny, yet inclined to rejoice in it, as it would secure to herself a spectacle, a new costume, and a costly gift. She kept looking at the girl critically, with her head on one side, and affecting to help her only hindered her, as she dressed for the first ceremonious dinner at which she had ever assisted.

‘To think you can dress yourself; how queer!’ cried the little censor. ‘I cannot put on a stocking, nor Toinon either. I never mean to do it. Mamma could not to save her life. How many women will you have? Two? three? Never let your maids carry your jewel-box; have it always put in the train by your major-domo, between two footmen. Mamma says all the robberies are done by the maids. What are you going to put on? You have only white frocks. Don’t you long to wear satin and velvet? Oh, you are so stupid; you ought to marry a shepherd, and wear lambs’-wool that you spun yourself. You must not be so simple. A Countess Othmar ought to be very magnificent. The finance is nothing if it do not look gorgeous. Oh, what are you doing? You must not put a black sash on; you are a fiancÉe. Have you got nothing but black? Wait a minute; I will run and get one of mine.’

‘I have always worn something black or grey since my grandmother died,’ said Yseulte, a little sadly.

But Blanchette made a pirouette.

‘Henri IV. est sur le Pont-Neuf!’ she cried. ‘Oh, you silly! You were Cendrillon yesterday; now you are the prince’s betrothed. Yesterday you were a little brown grub; now you are a butterfly. I will go and get my sash.’

The child flew out of the room and left Yseulte standing before the mirror, looking shyly at her own reflection as though she saw a stranger. She felt, indeed, a stranger to herself; so long she had been resigned to the religious life, so long she had been accustomed to regard obscurity, neglect, sadness, loneliness, as her natural lot; so long she had been trained to submission, lectured to the shade and the silence of resignation, that to be thus suddenly called out into the light, and lifted on to a pedestal, dazzled and almost paralysed her.

It seemed to her as though it could never be herself, Yseulte de Valogne, to whom her cousin had said, with an admiration that was almost reverence: ‘You will be the most enviable woman in Europe. Do you understand all you have done for yourself?’

She did not understand it; she only understood that he had rescued her from the conventual life, and that he loved her—surely he loved her, or he would not wish?——

Blanchette flew back into the room, accompanied by the maid FranÇoise.

‘Yseulte! Yseulte!’ she shrieked, waving a blue sash in one hand and with the other clasping to her a square parcel tied with silver cord. ‘Here is something he sends you: FranÇoise was bringing it. Open it quick, quick. Oh, what a happy creature you are, and you only stand and stare like the statues in the Luxembourg! Open it quick! It is sure to be something worth thousands and thousands of francs.’

‘Hush, Blanchette!’ said the girl, with a look of pain, as she took the packet and undid its covering. Within was the ivory casket; and within the casket was a necklace of great pearls.

A little note lay on them, which said merely:—

‘No one can dispossess you of the casket now. Receive what is within as a symbol of your own innocence and of my reverence for it.—Yours, with devotion, Othmar.’

On the other side of the paper was written more hastily:—‘Pardon me that I must leave immediately after dinner for Paris and shall not see you for a few days. I have explained to the Duchesse.’

Yseulte grew very pale. If the eyes of her little tormentor and of the woman FranÇoise had not been on her, she would have kissed his note and fallen on her knees and wept. As it was, she stood still in silence, reading the lines again and again, with sweet, warm tears in her eyes. It was Blanchette who took out the pearls and held them up in the lamplight, and appraised their value with the keenness of a jeweller and screamed in rapture over their size and colour.

‘They are the pigeon’s eggs!’ she cried, ‘ and four ropes of them; they must be worth an empire. They are as fine as mamma’s, and she has only three rows. I will marry into the finance myself. Oh, what a happy creature you are! Brown says it all came out of your going to gather flowers in his garden. Is that true? How clever it was of you! Who would ever have believed you were so clever, with your silent ways and your countryfied scruples. Let me see his note? You will not? What nonsense! You must put the pearls on. Let me fasten them. Four ropes! They are fit for a Court ball. What a corbeille he will send you!’

As she chattered she clasped it round the throat of her cousin, who grew red, then white, as the pearls touched her skin. They made her realise the immense change which one short day had made in her lot. They made her realise that Othmar henceforth was her lover.

While Blanchette chirped and skipped around her, directing her toilette with the accurate instinct in decoration of a little Parisienne, the eyes of the girl were suffused with unshed tears of gratitude and tremulous joy.

she was saying in her heart, although she had never read the Portuguese sonnets; while her little cousin babbled on of jewels and ball-dresses, and horses and establishments, and dowries and settlements, and the rÉgime dotal, and all the many matters which meant marriage to the precocious comprehension of Blanchette.

‘You will have your box at all the theatres, will you not? You have never been to a theatre, but I have. Mind that you go the evening after your marriage. When will your marriage be? I heard mamma say that he wished it to be very soon: but then there is all your lingerie, and all your gowns to be made. I suppose mamma will give you your trousseau; she must. Oh, how happy you ought to be, and you look just as grave as an owl! Nobody would guess you were going to be the Countess Othmar. Do you know that he could be made a prince if he liked? You have never learned to ride, Yseulte. What a pity! It is so chic to ride early in the Bois. Well, you will have a coupÉ for the early morning, and then you will have a Daumont for the afternoon, of course. There is nothing so pretty as postillions in velvet jackets and caps—if you only knew what colour his liveries are? Won’t you have out-riders? I do not know, though, whether you can; I think it is only ambassadresses and princesses of the blood who may have out-riders——You might have a special train every day,’ continued Blanchette, exciting herself with her own visions. ‘There is nothing such fun as a special train; we had one when grandmÈre was dying at Bois le Roy all in a moment and wanted to see us; it is so diverting to go on, on, on, through all the stations, past all the other trains, never stopping—pr-r-r-rut!’

‘Oh, hush, Blanchette! What do I care about those things?’ murmured Yseulte, as she put his note into the casket, locked it, and slipped the little silver key in her bosom, blushing very much as she did so.

It seemed so very wonderful to her that such lines should have been written to her. She wanted to be all alone to muse upon the marvel of it. She remembered a little nook in the convent garden where a bench was fixed against the high stone wall, under the branches of an old medlar tree; a place that she had gone to with her sorrows, her fancies, her visions, her tears, very often; she would have liked to have gone now to some such quiet and solitary nook, to realise in peace this miracle which had been wrought for her. But that was impossible; they had ordered her to dine with them at eight—her first great dinner. She must submit to be gazed at, commented on, complimented, felicitated.

The sensitive, delicate nature of the child shrank from the publicity of her triumph; but she understood that it was her duty, that henceforth these things would be a prominent portion of her duties; the wife of Othmar could not live shut away from the world.

Blanchette tossed her golden head with immeasurable contempt.

‘It is all “those things” that make a grand mariage. If you think you do not care now, you will care in a year’s time. Mamma said so. Mamma said you will be just like anybody else when you shall have been in the world six months.’

Yseulte shook her head with a smile, but she sighed a little also; it pained her that the world, and all it gave, was so intermingled with this beautiful, incredible, dream-like joy which had come to her like some vision brought by angels. In the singleness and sincerity of her young heart she thought: ‘Ah! if only he were poor!—how I wish he were poor!—then they would know and he!——’

But he was not poor, and he had sent her pearls worthy of an empress, and Blanchette was dancing before her in envy, longing to be sixteen years old too and betrothed to an archi-millionaire.

She cast one last timid glance at herself and at the great pearls lying beneath the slender ivory column of her throat, then she drew on her long gloves, and went, with a quickly-beating heart, down the staircase, Blanchette shouting after her Judic’s song,—

which the child had caught up from the echoes of the boulevards, and sang with as much by-play and meaning as Judic herself could have put into it.

There were some twenty people assembled in the oval drawing-room when Yseulte entered it. It was not of them she was afraid: it was of seeing Othmar before them. There was a murmur of admiration as she appeared in her childish white dress, with the superb necklace on, which a queen might have worn at a Court ball. Her shyness did not impair her grace; the stateliness and pride which were in her blood gave her composure even in her timidity; her eyes were dark and soft with conflicting feelings, her colour came and went. She never spoke audibly once in answer to all the compliment and felicitation she received, but she looked so lovely and so young that no one quarrelled with her silence. When Othmar gave her his arm she trembled from head to foot, but no one noticed it save Othmar himself.

‘Do not be afraid of me, my child,’ he murmured, and for the first time she took courage and looked at him with a rapid glance that was like a beam of sunlight. The look said to him, ‘I am not afraid, I am grateful; I love you, only I dare not say so, and I hardly understand what has happened.’

The dinner seemed both to her and to him interminable; she was quite silent through it, and ate nothing. She was conscious of a sullen gaze which her cousin, de Vannes, fastened on her, and which made her feel that, by him, she was unforgiven. She was confused by the florid speech made to her by the Baron Friederich, who was so enchanted by her that he put no measure to his audible admiration. Othmar, seated beside her, said very little. The party was gay, and the conversation animated. The silence of each of them passed unnoticed. The Duchesse, who alone remarked it, said to Raymond de Prangins:

‘It is their way of being in love; it is the old way, which they have copied out of Lamartine and Bernardin de St. Pierre. It is infinitely droll that Othmar should play the sentimental lover, but he does. I want Nadine Napraxine to see him like that. I asked her to dinner, but they had a dinner party at home. She sent me a little line just now, promising, if her people were gone, to come for an hour in the evening. The child looks well, does she not? What jewels he has given her! They are bigger than mine. It is the least he can do; the Finance is bound to buy big jewels. Who would ever have supposed he would have seen anything in that baby, that convent mouse? To be sure, she is handsome. Such a marriage for that little mouse to make! a mere baby like that, a child proud of being the mÉdaillon of her convent yesterday! After all, nothing takes some men like that air of innocence, which bores them to death as soon as they have put an end to it. It is like dew; it is like drinking milk in the meadow in the morning; we don’t care for the milk, but the doctors say it is good for us, and so——I wonder what she is thinking about. About her gowns, I dare say, or about her jewels. She is just like a vignette out of “Paul et Virginie.” She need not pretend to be in love with him; no one will believe in it; he will not believe in it himself; he is too rich. What can he have seen in her more than in five thousand other fillettes he might have married? To be sure she is handsome. She will be handsomer——’

She put up her eyeglass and looked down the table at her young cousin with amusement and envy, mingled as they mingled in little Blanchette. The amusement was at the girl’s evident embarrassment, the envy was of her youth, of her complexion, of her form, of all which told her own unerring instincts that Yseulte in a few years, even in a few months, would be one of the most beautiful women of her world.

And she said angrily to de Prangins, ‘Some men like children; it is as boys like green apples.’

‘At least the green apples are not painted,’ thought the young man as he murmured aloud a vague compliment. Raymond de Prangins, like most men of his age, had never looked twice at a fillette; he had been three weeks in the same house with this child and had never addressed a word to her or noticed whether her eyes were black or brown; but now that she had become the betrothed wife of Othmar, the charm of the forbidden fruit had come to her; she had suddenly become an object of interest in his sight; he was never tired of finding out her beauties, he was absorbed in studying the shape of her throat, the colour of her hair, the whiteness of her shoulders, which came so timidly and with a little shiver, like shorn lambs, out of the first low bodice that she had ever worn. To know that she was about to belong to another man, gave her all at once importance, enchantment, and desirability in his sight.