d you?"

"Never. He is terribly sly--"

She stopped abruptly as a light flashed through her mind; and, paying no
heed to de Gery, who came forward to do homage to her triumph, she
leaned hastily toward Aline and whispered to her. The other blushed,
protested with smiles, with inaudible words: "How can you imagine such a
thing? At my age. A grandmamma!" And at last she grasped her father's
arm to escape that friendly raillery.

When Felicia saw the two young people walk away side by side, when she
realized--what they themselves did not yet know--that they loved each
other, she felt as if everything about her were crumbling. And when her
dream lay at her feet, in a thousand fragments, she began to stamp upon
it in a rage. After all, he was quite right to prefer that little Aline
to her. Would a respectable man ever dare to marry Mademoiselle Ruys?
She with a home of her own, a family, nonsense! You are a strumpet's
daughter, my dear; you must be a strumpet yourself, if you wish to be
anything.

The day was drawing near its close. The crowd, moving more rapidly than
before, with gaps here and there, was beginning to stream toward the
exit, after eddying violently around the success of the year, surfeited,
a little weary, but still excited by the artistic electricity with which
the atmosphere was charged. A great ray of sunlight, the sunlight of
four o'clock in the afternoon, illuminated the rosework of the windows,
cast upon the gravelled paths rainbow-like beams that crept gently up
the bronze or marble of the statues, suffusing a lovely nude body with
bright colors and giving to the vast museum something of the aspect of a
garden. Felicia, absorbed in her profound, melancholy reverie, did not
see the man who came toward her, superb, refined, fascinating, through
the throng of visitors, who respectfully opened a passage for him, while
the name of "Mora" was whispered on every side.

"Well, well, Mademoiselle, this is a grand triumph. I regret only one
thing, that is the unpleasant symbolism that you have concealed in your
masterpiece."

When she saw the duke standing before her, she shuddered.

"Ah! yes, the symbolism," she said, looking up at him with a
disheartened smile; and, leaning against the pedestal of the great,
voluptuous statue, near which they happened to be standing, with her
eyes closed, like a woman who gives herself voluntarily or surrenders,
she murmured in a low, very low voice:

"Rabelais lied