She went into her bedroom, for she was stifling.  Calyste gave his letter to Beatrix and followed Camille.

“Calyste, you are loved, I think; but you are hiding something from me; you have done some foolish thing.”

“Loved!” he exclaimed, dropping into a chair.

Camille looked into the next room; Beatrix had disappeared.  The fact was odd.  Women do not usually leave a room which contains the man they admire, unless they have either the certainty of seeing him again, or something better still.  Mademoiselle des Touches said to herself:—­

“Can he have given her a letter?”

But she thought the innocent Breton incapable of such boldness.

“If you have disobeyed me, all will be lost, through your own fault,” she said to him very gravely.  “Go, now, and make your preparations for to-morrow.”

She made a gesture which Calyste did not venture to resist.

As he walked toward Croisic, to engage the boatmen, fears came into Calyste’s mind.  Camille’s speech foreshadowed something fatal, and he believed in the second sight of her maternal affection.  When he returned, four hours later, very tired, and expecting to dine at Les Touches, he found Camille’s maid keeping watch over the door, to tell him that neither her mistress nor the marquise could receive him that evening.  Calyste, much surprised, wished to question her, but she bade him hastily good-night and closed the door.

Six o’clock was striking on the steeple of Guerande as Calyste entered his own house, where Mariotte gave him his belated dinner; after which, he played mouche in gloomy meditation.  These alternations of joy and gloom, happiness and unhappiness, the extinction of hopes succeeding the apparent certainty of being loved, bruised and wounded the young soul which had flown so high on outstretched wings that the fall was dreadful.

“Does anything trouble you, my Calyste?” said his mother.

“Nothing,” he replied, looking at her with eyes from which the light of the soul and the fire of love were withdrawn.

It is not hope, but despair, which gives the measure of our ambitions.  The finest poems of hope are sung in secret, but grief appears without a veil.

“Calyste, you are not nice,” said Charlotte, after vainly attempting on him those little provincial witcheries which degenerate usually into teasing.

“I am tired,” he said, rising, and bidding the company good-night.

“Calyste is much changed,” remarked Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.

“We haven’t beautiful dresses trimmed with lace; we don’t shake our sleeves like this, or twist our bodies like that; we don’t know how to give sidelong glances, and turn our eyes,” said Charlotte, mimicking the air, and attitude, and glances of the marquise. “We haven’t that head voice, nor the interesting little cough, heu! heu! which sounds like the sigh of a spook; we have the misfortune of being healthy and robust, and of loving our friends without coquetry; and when we look at them, we don’t pretend to stick a dart into them, or to watch them slyly; we can’t bend our heads like a weeping willow, just to look the more interesting when we raise them—­this way.”