Instead of entering the room, the young man sat down upon a Gothic seat covered with green velvet, which stood on the landing beneath a window artistically framed in carved woods stained and varnished.  Nothing was ever more mysteriously melancholy than Camille’s improvisation; it seemed like the cry of a soul de profundis to God —­from the depths of a grave!  The heart of the young lover recognized the cry of despairing love, the prayer of a hidden plaint, the groan of repressed affliction.  Camille had varied, modified, and lengthened the introduction to the cavatina:  “Mercy for thee, mercy for me!” which is nearly the whole of the fourth act of “Robert le Diable.”  She now suddenly sang the words in a heart-rending manner, and then as suddenly interrupted herself.  Calyste entered, and saw the reason.  Poor Camille Maupin! poor Felicite!  She turned to him a face bathed with tears, took out her handkerchief and dried them, and said, simply, without affectation, “Good-morning.”  She was beautiful as she sat there in her morning gown.  On her head was one of those red chenille nets, much worn in those days, through which the coils of her black hair shone, escaping here and there.  A short upper garment made like a Greek peplum gave to view a pair of cambric trousers with embroidered frills, and the prettiest of Turkish slippers, red and gold.

“What is the matter?” cried Calyste.

“He has not returned,” she replied, going to a window and looking out upon the sands, the sea and the marshes.

This answer explained all.  Camille was awaiting Claude Vignon.

“You are anxious about him?” asked Calyste.

“Yes,” she answered, with a sadness the lad was too ignorant to analyze.

He started to leave the room.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To find him,” he replied.

“Dear child!” she said, taking his hand and drawing him toward her with one of those moist glances which are to a youthful soul the best of recompenses.  “You are distracted!  Where could you find him on that wide shore?”

“I will find him.”

“Your mother would be in mortal terror.  Stay.  Besides, I choose it,” she said, making him sit down upon the sofa.  “Don’t pity me.  The tears you see are the tears a woman likes to shed.  We have a faculty that is not in man,—­that of abandoning ourselves to our nervous nature and driving our feelings to an extreme.  By imagining certain situations and encouraging the imagination we end in tears, and sometimes in serious states of illness or disorder.  The fancies of women are not the action of the mind; they are of the heart.  You have come just in time; solitude is bad for me.  I am not the dupe of his professed desire to go to Croisic and see the rocks and the dunes and the salt-marshes without me.  He meant to leave us alone together; he is jealous, or, rather, he pretends jealousy, and you are young, you are handsome.”