“You will return, oh!  I beg you!  Ah! it is too bad to have run away!  You will come back!”

She was at once entreating and commanding him.  Rosas did not reply, but she felt in the trembling of his hand, as he pressed her own, in his brilliant glance, that she would see him again.  And since he had returned to Paris alone, weary of being absent from her, perhaps, seeing that he had hastened back after having desired to free himself from her, did it not seem this time that he was wholly captivated?

All this was expressed by a pressure of the fingers, a glance, a sigh.

Rosas went rapidly away, like one distracted.  Marianne, who motioned to Uncle Kayser to disappear, reappeared in the studio, entirely self-possessed.

Vaudrey had risen from the divan on which he had been sitting and he was standing, waiting.

“I believed that I understood that you had dismissed Monsieur de Rosas?”

“I might have told you that I did so, since it is true.”

“You smiled at him, nevertheless, just now.”

“Yes.”

“A man who begged you to be his mistress!”

“And whom I rejected, yes!”

She looked at Sulpice with her winsome, sidelong glance, curling her lovely pink lips that he had kissed so many times.

“Then you love that man?”

“I! not at all, only it is flattering to me to have him return like that, just like some penitent little boy.”

“I do not understand—­”

“Parbleu! you are not a woman, that is all that that proves!—­It is irritating to our self-love to see people too promptly accept the dismissal one gives them.  What!  Don’t they suffer?  Don’t they say anything?  Don’t they complain?  Monsieur de Rosas comes back to me, that proves that he was hurt, and I triumph.  Now, do you understand?”

“And—­that joy that I observed is—?”

“It is because Monsieur de Rosas is in Paris.”

“And you don’t love him?  You don’t love him?” asked Vaudrey, clasping Marianne’s hands in his.

She laughed and said: 

“I do not love him in the least.”

“And you love me?”

“Yes, you, I love you!”

“Marianne, you know that it would be very wicked and wrong to lie!  It is not necessary to love me at all if you must cease to love me!”

“In other words, one should never lend money unless one is obliged to lend one’s whole fortune.”

He felt extremely dissatisfied with Marianne’s ironical remark.  She looked at him with an odd expression which was all the more disquieting and intoxicating.

“Let us speak no more about that, shall we?” she said.  “I repeat to you that I am satisfied at having seen Monsieur de Rosas again, because it affords my self-love its revenge.  Now, whether he comes back or not, it matters little to me.  He has made the amende honorable.  That is the principal thing, and you, my dear, must not be jealous; I find Othello’s role tiresome; oh! yes, tiresome!—­The more so, because you have no right to treat me as a Desdemona.  The Code does not permit it.”