.

Calyste rose, took Camille's hand, and kissed it. Then he went to the
piano and ran his finger-nail over the notes, making them all sound at
once, like a rapid scale. This exuberance of joy surprised Camille, and
made her thoughtful; she signed to Calyste to come to her.

"What is the matter with you?" she whispered in his ear.

"Nothing," he replied.

"There is something between them," thought Mademoiselle des Touches.

The marquise was impenetrable. Camille tried to make Calyste talk,
hoping that his artless mind would betray itself; but the youth excused
himself on the ground that his mother expected him, and he left Les
Touches at eleven o'clock,--not, however, without having faced the fire
of a piercing glance from Camille, to whom that excuse was made for the
first time.

After the agitations of a wakeful night filled with visions of Beatrix,
and after going a score of times through the chief street of Guerande
for the purpose of meeting the answer to his letter, which did not
come, Calyste finally received the following reply, which the marquise's
waiting-woman, entering the hotel du Guenic, presented to him.
He carried it to the garden, and there, in the grotto, he read as
follows:--

Madame de Rochefide to Calyste.

You are a noble child, but you are only a child. You are bound to
Camille, who adores you. You would not find in me either the
perfections that distinguish her or the happiness that she can
give you. Whatever you may think, she is young and I am old; her
heart is full of treasures, mine is empty; she has for you a
devotion you ill appreciate; she is unselfish; she lives only for
you and in you. I, on the other hand, am full of doubts; I should
drag you down to a wearisome life, without grandeur of any kind,
--a life ruined by my own conduct. Camille is free; she can go and
come as she will; I am a slave.

You forget that I love and am beloved. The situation in which I
have placed myself forbids my accepting homage. That a man should
love me, or say he loves me, is an insult. To turn to another
would be to place myself at the level of the lowest of my sex.

You, who are young and full of delicacy, how can you oblige me to
say these things, which rend my heart as they issue from it?

I preferred the scandal of an irreparable deed to the shame of
constant deception; my own loss of station to a loss of honesty.
In the eyes of many persons whose es