t notice the intense excitement under which her daughter
labored, the alteration of her features, and the incoherence of her
words.

"What is the matter?" she asked, somewhat alarmed. "What are you
saying?"

"I feel unwell," answered her daughter in a scarcely audible voice,
"quite unwell. Come, let us go home."

As soon as they reached home, Mlle. Gilberte took refuge in her own
room. She was in haste to be alone, to recover her self-possession,
to collect her thoughts, more scattered than dry leaves by a storm
wind.

It was a momentous event which had just suddenly fallen in her life
so monotonous and so calm--an inconceivable, startling event, the
consequences of which were to weigh heavily upon her entire future.

Staggering still, she was asking herself if she was not the victim
of an hallucination, and if really there was a man who had dared to
conceive and execute the audacious project of coming thus under the
eyes of her mother, of declaring his love, and of asking her in
return a solemn engagement. But what stupefied her more still, what
confused her, was that she had actually endured such an attempt.

Under what despotic influence had she, then, fallen? To what
undefinable sentiments had she obeyed? And if she had only
tolerated! But she had done more: she had actually encouraged.
By detaining her mother when she wished to go home (and she had
detained her), had she not said to this unknown?--"Go on, I allow
it: I am listening."

And he had gone on. And she, at the moment of returning home, she
had engaged herself formally to reflect, and to return the next day
at a stated hour to give an answer. In a word, she had made an
appointment with him.

It was enough to make her die of shame. And, as if she had needed
the sound of her own words to convince herself of the reality of the
fact, she kept repeating loud,

"I have made an appointment--I, Gilberte, with a man whom my parents
do not know, and of whose name I was still ignorant yesterday."

And yet she could not take upon herself to be indignant at the
imprudent boldness of her conduct. The bitterness of the reproaches
which she was addressing to herself was not sincere. She felt it so
well, that at last:

"Such hypocrisy is unworthy of me," she exclaimed, "since now,
still, and without the excuse of being taken by surprise, I would
not act otherwise."

The fact is, the more she pondered, the less she could succeed in
discovering