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” ‘These damned females never know what they want. I will wager my head now that if I go home and tell her that I have sent to ask my friends to dine with me at the /Rocher de Cancale/, she will not be satisfied though she made the arrangement herself.–But she will have gone off somewhere or other. I wonder whether there is something at the bottom of all this, an assignation with some goat? No. In the bottom of her heart she loves me!’ “

The Marquise could not help smiling.

“Ah, madame,” said Nathan, looking keenly at her, “only women and prophets know how to turn faith to account.–Du Bruel would have me go home with him,” he continued, “and we went slowly back. It was three o’clock. Before he appeared, he heard a stir in the kitchen, saw preparations going forward, and glanced at me as he asked the cook the reason of this.

” ‘Madame ordered dinner,’ said the woman. ‘Madame dressed and ordered a cab, and then she changed her mind and ordered it again for the theatre this evening.’

” ‘Good,’ exclaimed du Bruel, ‘what did I tell you?’

“We entered the house stealthily. No one was there. We went from room to room until we reached a little boudoir, and came upon Tullia in tears. She dried her eyes without affectation, and spoke to du Bruel.

” ‘Send a note to the /Rocher de Cancale/,’ she said, ‘and ask your guests to dine here.’

“She was dressed as only women of the theatre can dress, in a simply- made gown of some dainty material, neither too costly nor too common, graceful and harmonious in outline and coloring; there was nothing conspicuous about her, nothing exaggerated–a word now dropping out of use, to be replaced by the word ‘artistic,’ used by fools as current coin. In short, Tullia looked like a gentlewoman. At thirty-seven she had reached the prime of a Frenchwoman’s beauty. At this moment the celebrated oval of her face was divinely pale; she had laid her hat aside; I could see a faint down like the bloom of fruit softening the silken contours of a cheek itself so delicate. There was a pathetic charm about her face with its double cluster of fair hair; her brilliant gray eyes were veiled by a mist of tears; her nose, delicately carved as a Roman cameo, with its quivering nostrils; her little mouth, like a child’s even now; her long queenly throat, with the veins standing out upon it; her chin, flushed for the moment by some secret despair; the pink tips of her ears, the hands that trembled under her gloves, everything about her told of violent feeling. The feverish twitching of her eyebrows betrayed her pain. She looked sublime.

“Her first words had crushed du Bruel. She looked at us both, with that penetrating, impenetrable cat-like glance which only actresses and great ladies can use. Then she held out her hand to her husband.

” ‘Poor dear, you had scarcely gone before I blamed myself a thousand times over. It seemed to me that I had been horribly ungrateful. I told myself that I had been unkind.–Was I very unkind?’ she asked, turning to me.–‘Why not receive your friends? Is it not your house? Do you want to know the reason of it all? Well, I was afraid that I was not loved; and indeed I was half-way between repentance and the shame of going back. I read the newspapers, and saw that there was a first night at the Varietes, and I thought you had meant to give the dinner to a collaborator. Left to myself, I gave way, I dressed to hurry out after you–poor pet.’

“Du Bruel looked at me triumphantly, not a vestige of a recollection of his orations /contra Tullia/ in his mind.

” ‘Well, dearest, I have not spoken to any one of them,’ he said.