He did not permit her to finish, and responded proudly:  “I thank you, with all my heart.  I have sworn to be under obligations to none but myself.”

“Very well,” she replied, “you will visit us for our pleasure.  In a month we shall be at Cormeilles.”

He shook his head in sign of refusal.  She looked fixedly at him, and said, “It must be so.”

This look, these words, sent to Count Abel’s brain such a thrill of joy and of hope that for a moment he thought he had betrayed himself.  He nearly fell on his knees before Mlle. Moriaz, but, speedily mastering his emotions, he bowed gravely, casting down his eyes.  She herself immediately resumed her usual voice and manner, and questioned him on his journey.  He told her, in reply, that he proposed to go by the route of Soleure, and to stay there a day in order to visit in Gurzelengasse the house where Kosciuszko, the greatest of Poles, had died.  He had thought of this pilgrimage for a long time.  He added:  “Still another useless action.  Ah! when shall I improve?”

“Don’t improve too much,” she said, smiling.  And then he went away.

M. Moriaz returned to the hotel about noon:  his guide being engaged elsewhere, he had taken only a short ramble.  After breakfast his daughter proposed to him that he should go down with her to the banks of the lake.  They made the descent, which is not difficult.  This pretty piece of water, that has been falsely accused of resembling a shaving-dish, is said to be not less than a mile in length.  When the father and daughter reached the entrance of the woods that pedestrians pass through in going to Pontresina, they seated themselves on the grass at the foot of a larch.  They remained some time silent.  Antoinette watched the cows grazing, and stroked the smooth, glossy leaves of a yellow gentian with the end of her parasol.  M. Moriaz busied himself with neither the cows nor the yellow gentian—­he thought of M. Camille Langis, and felt more than a little guilty in that quarter; he had not written to him, having nothing satisfactory to tell him.  He could see the young man waiting in vain, at the Hotel Steinbock.  To pass a fortnight at Chur is a torture that the most robust constitution scarcely can endure, and it is an increased torture to watch every evening and every morning for a letter that never comes.  M. Moriaz resolved to open hostilities, to begin a new assault on the impregnable place.  He was seeking in his mind for a beginning for his first phrase.  He had just found it, when suddenly Antoinette said to him, in a low, agitated, but distinct voice:  “I have a question for you.  What would you think if I should some day marry M. Abel Larinski?”

M. Moriaz started up, and his cane, slipping from his hand, rolled to the bottom of the declivity.  He looked at his daughter, and said to her:  “I beg of you to repeat what you just said to me.  I fear I have misunderstood you.”

She answered in a firmer voice, “I am curious to know what you would think if I should marry, some day or other, Count Larinski.”