During breakfast, which Calyste was invited to share, the marquise, whose sentiments could be noble and generous, made a sudden return upon herself, resolving to stifle the germs of love which were rising in her heart.  She was neither cold nor hard to Calyste, but gently indifferent,—­a course which tortured him.  Felicite brought forward a proposition that they should make, on the next day but one, an excursion into the curious and interesting country lying between Les Touches, Croisic, and the village of Batz.  She begged Calyste to employ himself on the morrow in hiring a boat and sailors to take them across the little bay, undertaking herself to provide horses and provisions, and all else that was necessary for a party of pleasure, in which there was to be no fatigue.  Beatrix stopped the matter short, however, by saying that she did not wish to make excursions round the country.  Calyste’s face, which had beamed with delight at the prospect, was suddenly overclouded.

“What are you afraid of, my dear?” asked Camille.

“My position is so delicate I do not wish to compromise—­I will not say my reputation, but my happiness,” she said, meaningly, with a glance at the young Breton.  “You know very well how suspicious Conti can be; if he knew—­”

“Who will tell him?”

“He is coming back here to fetch me,” said Beatrix.

Calyste turned pale.  In spite of all that Camille could urge, in spite of Calyste’s entreaties, Madame de Rochefide remained inflexible, and showed what Camille had called her obstinacy.  Calyste left Les Touches the victim of one of those depressions of love which threaten, in certain men, to turn into madness.  He began to revolve in his mind some decided means of coming to an explanation with Beatrix.

XII

CORRESPONDENCE

When Calyste reached home, he did not leave his room until dinner time; and after dinner he went back to it.  At ten o’clock his mother, uneasy at his absence, went to look for him, and found him writing in the midst of a pile of blotted and half-torn paper.  He was writing to Beatrix, for distrust of Camille had come into his mind.  The air and manner of the marquise during their brief interview in the garden had singularly encouraged him.

No first love-letter ever was or ever will be, as may readily be supposed, a brilliant effort of the mind.  In all young men not tainted by corruption such a letter is written with gushings from the heart, too overflowing, too multifarious not to be the essence, the elixir of many other letters begun, rejected, and rewritten.

Here is the one that Calyste finally composed and which he read aloud to his poor, astonished mother.  To her the old mansion seemed to have taken fire; this love of her son flamed up in it like the glare of a conflagration.

  Calyste to Madame la Marquise de Rochefide.